FLORIDA SKETCH'BOr^ 




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A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK. i6mo, $ 


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Boston and New York. 





A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK 



BY 



/ 



BRADFORD TORREY 




.a^ OF COyV/^.- 



I 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1894 



Copyright, 1894, 
By BRADFORD TORREY. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped aud Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. 






CONTENTS 



In the Flat-Woods .... 

Beside the Marsh 

On the Beach at Daytona 

Along the Hillsborough 

A Morning at the Old Sugar Mill 

On the Upper St. John's 

On the St. Augustine Road . 

Ornithology on a Cotton Plantation 

A Florida Shrine .... 

Walks about Tallael^ssee . 



PAGE 
1 

34 
41 

68 
102 
121 
151 
180 
193 
204 



A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK. 



IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 

In approaching Jacksonville by rail, the 
traveler rides hour after hour through seem- 
ingly endless pine barrens, otherwise known 
as low pine-woods and flat-woods, till he 
wearies of the sight. It would be hard, he 
thinks, to imagine a region more unwhole- 
some looking and uninteresting, more pov- 
erty-stricken and God-forsaken, in its entire 
aspect. Surely, men who would risk life in 
behaK of such a country deserved to win 
their cause. 

Monotonous as the flat-woods were, how- 
ever, and malarious as they looked, — arid 
wastes and stretches of stagnant water flying 
past the car window in perpetual alternation, 
— I was impatient to get into them. They 
were a world the like of which I had 
never seen ; and wherever I went in eastern 
Florida, I made it one of my earliest concerns 
to seek them out. 



2 IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 

My first impression was one of disappoint- 
ment, or perhaps I should rather say, of 
bewilderment. In fact, I returned from my 
first visit to the flat-woods under the delusion 
that I had not been into them at all. This 
was at St. Augustine, whither I had gone 
after a night only in Jacksonville. I looked 
about the quaint little city, of course, and 
went to the South Beach, on St. Anastasia 
Island ; then I wished to see the pine lands. 
They were to be found, I was told, on the 
other side of the San Sebastian. The sun 
was hot (or so it seemed to a man fresh 
from the rigors of a New England winter), 
and the sand was deep ; but I sauntered 
through New Augustine, and pushed on up 
the road toward Moultrie (I believe it was), 
till the last houses were passed and I came 
to the edge of the pine-woods. Here, pres- 
ently, the roads began to fork in a very 
confusing manner. The first man I met — 
a kindly cracker — cautioned me against 
getting lost ; but I had no thought of taking 
the slightest risk of that kind. I was not 
going to ex'plore the woods, but only to enter 
them, sit down, look about me, and listen. 
The difficulty was to get into them. As I 



IN THE FLAT- WOODS. 



advanced, they receded. It was still only 
the beginning of a wood ; the trees far apart 
and comparatively small, the ground covered 
thickly with saw palmetto, interspersed here 
and there with patches of brown grass or 
sedge. 

In many places the roads were under 
water, and as I seemed to be making little 
progress, I pretty soon sat down in a pleas- 
antly shaded spot. Wagons came along at 
intervals, all going toward the city, most of 
them with loads of wood ; ridiculously small 
loads, such as a Yankee boy would put upon 
a wheelbarrow. " A fine day," said I to the 
driver of such a cart. " Yes, sir," he an- 
swered, " it 's a pretti/ day." He spoke with 
an emphasis which seemed to imply that he 
accepted my remark as well meant, but 
hardly adequate to the occasion. Perhaps, 
if the day had been a few shades brighter, 
he would have called it '' handsome," or even 
" good looking." Expressions of this kind, 
however, are matters of local or individual 
taste, and as such are not to be disputed 
about. Thus, a man stopped me in Talla- 
hassee to inquire what time it was. I told 
him, and he said, " Ah, a little sooner than 



4 IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 

I thought." And why not " sooner " as 
well as " earlier " ? But when, on the same 
road, two white girls in an ox-cart hailed me 
with the question, "What time 't is?" I 
thought the interrogative idiom a little queer ; 
almost as queer, shall we say, as " How do 
you do ? " may have sounded to the first 
man who heard it, — if the reader is able 
to imagine such a person. 

Meanwhile, let the morning be " fine " or 
" pretty," it was all one to the birds. The 
woods were vocal with the cackling of robins, 
the warble of bluebirds, and the trills of 
pine warblers. Flickers were shouting — or 
laughing, if one pleased to hear it so — with 
true flickerish prolixity, and a single downy 
woodpecker called sharply again and again. 
A mocking-bird near me (there is always a 
mocking-bird near you, in Florida) added 
his voice for a time, but soon relapsed into 
silence. The fact was characteristic ; for, 
wherever I went, I found it true that the 
mocker grew less musical as the place grew 
wilder. By instinct he is a public performer , 
he demands an audience ; and it is only in 
cities, like St. Augustine and Tallahassee, 
that he is heard at his freest and best. A 



IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 5 

loggerhead shrike — now close at my elbow, 
now farther away — was practicing his ex- 
tensive vocabulary with perseverance, if not 
with enthusiasm. Like his relative the 
" great northern," though perhaps in a less 
degree, the loggerhead is commonly at an 
extreme, either loquacious or dimib ; as if he 
could not let his moderation be known unto 
any man. Sometimes I fancied him pos- 
sessed with an insane ambition to match the 
mocking-bird in song as well as in personal 
appearance. If so, it is not surprising that 
he should be subject to fits of discourage- 
ment and silence. Aiming at the sun, 
though a good and virtuous exercise, as we 
have all heard, is apt to prove dispiriting to 
sensible marksmen. Crows (fish crows, in 
all probability, but at the time I did not 
know it) uttered strange, hoarse, flat-sound- 
ing caws. Every bird of them must have 
been born without a palate, it seemed to me. 
White-eyed chewinks were at home in the 
dense palmetto scrub, whence they announced 
themselves unmistakably by sharp whistles. 
Now and then one of them mounted a leaf, 
and allowed me to see his pale yellow iris. 
Except for this mark, recognizable almost as 



6 IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 

far as the bird could be distinguished at all, 
lie looked exactly like our common New 
England towhee. Somewhere behind me 
was a king-fisher's rattle, and from a savanna 
in the same direction came the songs of 
meadow larks ; familiar, but with something 
unfamiliar about them at the same time, 
unless my ears deceived me. 

More interesting than any of the birds yet 
named, because more strictly characteristic 
of the place, as well as more strictly new to 
me, were the brown-headed nuthatches. I 
was on the watch for them : they were one 
of the three novelties which I knew were to 
be found in the pine lands, and nowhere else, 
— the other two being the red-cockaded 
woodpecker and the pine-wood sparrow ; and 
being thus on the lookout, I did not expect 
to be taken by surprise, if such a paradox 
(it is nothing worse) may be allowed to pass. 
But when I heard them twittering in the 
distance, as I did almost immediately, I had 
no suspicion of what they were. The voice 
had nothing of that nasal quality, that Yan- 
kee twang, as some people would call it, 
which I had always associated with the nut- 
hatch family. On the contrary, it was de- 



IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 7 

cidedly finchlike, — so much so that some of 
the notes, taken by themselves, woukl have 
been ascribed without hesitation to the gold- 
finch or the pine finch, had I heard them in 
New England ; and even as things were, I 
was more than once deceived for the moment. 
As for the birds themselves, they were evi- 
dently a cheerful and thrifty race, much 
more numerous than the red-cockaded wood- 
peckers, and much less easily overlooked 
than the pine-wood sparrows. I seldom 
entered the flat-woods anywhere without 
finding them. They seek their food largely 
about the leafy ends of the pine branches, 
resembling the Canadian nuthatches in this 
respect, so that it is only on rare occasions 
that one sees them creeping about the trunks 
or larger limbs. Unlike their two Northern 
relatives, they are eminently social, often 
traveling in small flocks, even in the breed- 
ing season, and keeping up an almost inces- 
sant chorus of shrill twitters as they flit 
hither and thither through the woods. The 
first one to come near me was full of inquisi- 
tiveness ; he flew back and forth past my head, 
exactly as chickadees do in a similar mood, 
and once seemed almost ready to alight on 



8 IN THE FLAT-WOODS, 

my hat. " Let us have a look at this 
stranger," he appeared to be saying. Pos- 
sibly his nest was not far off, but I made no 
search for it. Afterwards I found two nests, 
one in a low stump, and one in the trunk of 
a pine, fifteen or twenty feet from the ground. 
Both of them contained young ones (March 
31 and April 2), as I knew by the continual 
goings-in-and-out of the fathers and mothers. 
In dress the brown-head is dingy, with little 
or nothing of the neat and attractive appear- 
ance of our New England nuthatches. 

In this pine-wood on the road to Moidtrie 
I found no sign of the new woodpecker or 
the new sparrow. Nor was I greatly disap- 
pointed. The place itself was a sufficient 
novelty, — the place and the summer weather. 
The pines murmured overhead, and the pal- 
mettos rustled aU about. Now a butterfly 
fluttered past me, and now a dragonfly. 
More than one little flock of tree swallows 
went over the wood, and once a pair of 
phoebes amused me by an uncommonly pretty 
lover's quarrel. Truly it was a pleasant 
hour. In the midst of it there came along 
a man in a cart, with a load of wood. We 
exchanged the time of day, and I remarked 



IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 9 

upon the smallness of his load. Yes, he said ; 
but it was a pretty heavy load to drag seven 
or eight miles over such roads. Possibly he 
understood me as implying that he seemed 
to be in rather small business, although I had 
no such purpose, for he went on to say : " In 
1861, when this beautiful war broke out be- 
tween our countries, my father owned nig- 
gers. We did n't have to do this. But I 
don't complain. If I had n't got a buUet in 
me, I should do pretty well." 

" Then you were in the war ? " I said. 

" Oh, yes, yes, sir ! I was in the Confed- 
erate service. Yes, sir, I 'm a Southerner 
to the backbone. My grandfather was a 
" (I missed the patronymic), " and com- 
manded St. Augustine." 

The name had a foreign sound, and the 
man's complexion was swarthy, and in all 
simplicity I asked if he was a Minorcan. I 
might as well have touched a lighted match 
to powder. His eyes flashed, and he came 
round the tail of the cart, gesticulating with 
his stick. 

" Minorcan ! " he broke out. " Spain and 
the island of Minorca are two places, ain't 
they?" 



10 IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 

I admitted meekly that tliey were. 

" You are English, ain't you ? " he went on. 
" You are English, — Yankee born, — ain't 
you?" 

I owned it. 

" Well, I 'm Spanish. That ain't Minor- 
can. My grandfather was a , and com- 
manded St. Augustine. He couldn't have 
done that if he had been Minorcan." 

By this time he was quieting down a bit. 
His father remembered the Indian war. 
The son had heard him tell about it. 

" Those were dangerous times," he re- 
marked. "You couldn't have been stand- 
injr out here in the woods then." 

" There is no danger here now, is there ? " 
said I. 

"No, no, not now." But as he drove 
along he turned to say that he was n't afraid 
of any thing ; he was n't that kind of a man. 
Then, with a final turn, he added, what I 
could not dispute, " A man's life is always 
in danger." 

After he was gone, I regretted that I had 
offered no apology for my unintentionally 
offensive question ; but I was so taken by 
surprise, and so much interested in the man 



IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 11 

as a specimen, tliat I quite forgot my man- 
ners till it was too late. One thing I learned : 
that it is not prudent, in these days, to judge 
a Southern man's blood, in either sense of 
the word, by his dress or occupation. This 
man had brought seven or eight miles a load 
of wood that might possibly be worth sev- 
enty-five cents (I questioned the owner of 
what looked like just such a load afterward, 
and found his asking price half a dollar), and 
for clothing had on a pair of trousers and a 
blue cotton shirt, the latter full of holes, 
through which the skin was visible ; yet his 
father was a and had "owned niggers." 

A still more picturesque figure in this pro- 
cession of wood-carters was a boy of perhaps 
ten or eleven. He rode his horse, and was 
barefooted and barelegged; but he had a 
cigarette in his mouth, and to each brown 
heel was fastened an enormous spur. Who 
was it that infected the world with the fool- 
ish and disastrous notion that work and play 
are two different things ? And was it Em- 
erson, or some other wise man, who said that 
a boy was the true philosopher ? 

When it came time to think of returning 
to St. Augustine for dinner, I appreciated 



12 IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 

my cracker's friendly warning against losing 
my way ; for though I had hardly so much 
as entered the woods, and had taken, as I 
thought, good heed to my steps, I was almost 
at once in a quandary as to my road. There 
was no occasion for worry, — with the sun 
out, and my general course perfectly plain ; 
but here was a fork in the road, and whether 
to bear to the left or to the right was a sim- 
ple matter of guess-work. I made the best 
guess I could, and guessed wrong, as was 
apparent after a while, when I found the 
road under deep water for several rods. I 
objected to wading, and there was no ready 
way of going round, since the oak and pal- 
metto scrub crowded close up to the road- 
side, and just here was all but impenetrable. 
What was still more conclusive, the road 
was the wrong one, as the inundation proved, 
and, for aught I could tell, might carry me 
far out of my course. I turned back, there- 
fore, under the midday sun, and by good 
luck a second attempt brought me out of the 
woods very near where I had entered them. 
I visited this particular piece of country 
but once afterward, having in the mean 
time discovered a better place of the same 



IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 13 

sort along the railroad, in the direction of 
Palatka. There, on a Sunday morning, I 
heard my first pine-wood sparrow. Time 
and tune could hardly have been in truer 
accord. The hour was of the quietest, the 
strain was of the simplest, and the bird sang 
as if he were dreaming. For a long time I 
let him go on without attempting to make 
certain who he was. He seemed to be rather 
far off : if I waited his pleasure, he woidd 
perhaps move toward me ; if I disturbed him, 
he would probably become silent. So I sat 
on the end of a sleeper and listened. It was 
not great music. It made me think of the 
swamp sparrow ; and the swamp sparrow is 
far from being a great singer. A single pro- 
longed, drawling note (in that respect un- 
like the swamp sparrow, of course), followed 
by a succession of softer and sweeter ones, — 
that was all, when I came to analyze it ; but 
that is no fair description of what I heard. 
The quality of the song is not there ; and it 
was the quality, the feeling, the soul of it, 
if I may say what I mean, that made it, in 
the true sense of a much-abused word, 
charming. 
There could be little doubt that the bird was 



14 IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 

a pine-wood sparrow ; but such things are not 
to be taken for granted. Once or twice, in- 
deed, the thought of some unfamiliar warbler 
had crossed my mind. At last, therefore, as 
the singer still kept out of sight, I leaped the 
ditch and pushed into the scrub. Happily I 
had not far to go ; he had been much nearer 
than I thought. A small bird flew up before 
me, and dropped almost immediately into a 
clump of palmetto. I edged toward the spot 
and waited. Then the song began again, 
this time directly in front of me, but still far- 
away-sounding and dreamy. I find that last 
word in my hasty note penciled at the time, 
and can think of no other that expresses the 
effect half so well. I looked and looked, and 
all at once there sat the bird on a palmetto 
leaf. Once again he sang, putting up his 
head. Then he dropped out of sight, and I 
heard nothing more. I had seen only his 
head and neck, — enough to show him a spar- 
row, and almost of necessity the pine-wood 
sparrow. No other strange member of the 
finch family was to be looked for in such a 
place. 

On further acquaintance, let me say at 
once, Puccea cestivalis proved to be a more 



IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 15 

versatile singer than tlie performances of my 
first bird would have led me to suppose. 
He varies his tune freely, but always within 
a pretty narrow compass ; as is true, also, of 
the field sparrow, with whom, as I soon came 
to feel, he has not a little in common. It is 
in musical form only that he suggests the 
swamp sparrow. In tone and spirit, in the 
qualities of sweetness and expressiveness, 
he is nearly akin to Sjnzella pusilla. One 
does for the Southern pine barren what the 
other does for the Northern berry pasture. 
And this is high praise ; for though in New 
England we have many singers more brilliant 
than the field sparrow, we have none that 
are sweeter, and few that in the long run 
give more pleasure to sensitive hearers. 

I found the pine-wood sparrow afterward 
in New Smyrna, Port Orange, Sanford, and 
Tallahassee. So far as I could tell, it was 
always the same bird ; but I shot no speci- 
mens, and speak with no authority.^ Living 

1 Two races of the pine-wood sparrow are reeog'nized 
by omitholog-ists, Puccea cestivalis and P. cestivalis bach- 
manii, and both of them have been found in Florida ; but, 
if I understand the matter right, Puccea cestivalis is the 
common and typical Florida bird. 



16 IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 

always in tlie pine lands, and haunting the 
dense undergrowth, it is heard a hundred 
times where it is seen once, — a point greatly 
in favor of its effectiveness as a musician. 
Mr. Brewster speaks of it as singing always 
from an elevated perch, while the birds that 
I saw in the act of song, a very limited num- 
ber, were invariably perched low. One that 
I watched in New Smyrna (one of a small 
chorus, the others being invisible) sang for 
a quarter of an hour from a stake or stump 
which rose perhaps a foot above the dwarf 
palmetto. It was the same song that I had 
heard in St. Augustine ; only the birds here 
were in a livelier mood, and sang out instead 
of sotto voce. The long introductory note 
sounded sometimes as if it were indrawn, and 
often, if not always, had a considerable burr 
in it. Once in a while the strain was caught 
up at the end and sung over again, after the 
manner of the field sparrow, — one of that 
bird's prettiest tricks. At other times the 
song was delivered with full voice, and then 
repeated almost under the singer's breath. 
This was done beautifully in the Port Orange 
flat-woods, the bird being almost at my feet. 
I had seen him a moment before, and saw him 



IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 17 

again half a minute later, but at that in- 
stant he was out of sight in the scrub, and 
seemingly on the ground. This feature of 
the song, one of its chief merits and its most 
striking peculiarity, is well described by Mr. 
Brewster. " Now," he says, " it has a full, 
bell-like ring that seems to fill the air around ; 
next it is soft and low and inexpressibly ten- 
der ; now it is clear again, but so modidated 
that the sound seems to come from a great 
distance." ^ 

Not many other birds, I think (I cannot 
recall any), habitually vary their song in this 
manner. Other birds sing almost inaudibly 
at times, especially in the autumnal season. 
Even the brown thrasher, whose ordinary 
performance is so full-voiced, not to say bois- 
terous, will sometimes soliloquize, or seem to 
soliloquize, in the faintest of undertones. 
The formless autumnal warble of the song 
sparrow is familiar to every one. And in 
this connection I remember, and am not 
likely ever to forget, a winter wren who 
favored me with what I thought the most 
bewitching bit of vocalism to which I had 

1 Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, vol. vii. 
p. 98. 



18 IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 

ever listened. He was in tlie bushes close 
at my side, in the Franconia Notch, and de- 
livered his whole song, with all its customary 
length, intricacy, and speed, in a tone — a 
whisper, I may almost say — that ran along 
the very edge of silence. The unexpected 
proximity of a stranger may have had some- 
thing to do with his conduct, as it often 
appears to have with the thrasher's ; but, 
however that may be, the cases are not 
parallel with that of the j^ine-wood sparrow, 
inasmuch as the latter bird not merely sings 
under his breath on special occasions, whether 
on account of the nearness of a listener or 
for any other reason, but in his ordinary sing- 
ing uses louder and softer tones interchange- 
ably, almost exactly as human singers and 
players do ; as if, in the practice of his art, 
he had learned to appreciate, consciously or 
unconsciously (and practice naturally goes 
before theory), the expressive value of what 
I believe is called musical dynamics. 

I spent many half-days in the pine lands 
(how gladly now would I spend another !), 
but never got far into them. (" Into their 
depths," my pen was on the point of making 
me say ; but that would have been a false 



IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 19 

note. The flat-woods have no " depths.") 
Whether I followed the railway, — in many- 
respects a pretty satisfactory method, — or 
some roundabout, aimless carriage road, a 
mile or two was generally enough. The 
country offers no temptation to pedestrian 
feats, nor does the imagination find its ac- 
count in going farther and farther. For the 
reader is not to think of the flat-woods as in 
the least resembling a Northern forest, which 
at every turn opens before the visitor and 
beckons him forward. Beyond and behind, 
and on either side, the pine-woods are ever 
the same. It is this monotony, by the bye, 
this utter absence of landmarks, that makes 
it so unsafe for the stranger to wander far 
from the beaten track. The sand is deep, 
the sun is hot ; one place is as good as an- 
other. What use, then, to tire yourself? 
And so, unless the traveler is going some- 
where, as I seldom was, he is continually 
stopping by the way. Now a shady spot 
entices him to put down his umbrella, — for 
there is a shady spot, here and there, even 
in a Florida pine-Wood ; or blossoms are to 
be plucked ; or a butterfly, some gorgeous 
and nameless creature, brightens the wood 



20 IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 

as it j)asses ; or a bird is singing ; or an 
eagle is soaring far overhead, and must be 
watched out of sight ; or a buzzard, with 
upturned wings, floats suspiciously near the 
wanderer, as if with sinister intent (buzzard 
shadows are a regular feature of the flat- 
wood landscape, just as cloud shadows are 
in a mountainous country) ; or a snake lies 
stretched out in the sun, — a " whip snake," 
perhaps, that frightens the unwary stroller 
by the amazing swiftness with which it runs 
away from him ; or some strange invisible 
insect is making uncanny noises in the 
underbrush. One of my recollections of 
the railway woods at St. Augustine is of 
a cricket, or locust, or something else, — I 
never saw it, — that amused me often with 
a formless rattling or drumming sound. I 
could think of nothing but a boy's first les- 
son upon the bones, the rhythm of the beats 
was so comically mistimed and bungled. 

One fine morning, — it was the 18th of 
February, — I had gone down the railroad 
a little farther than usual, attracted by the 
encouraging appearance of a swampy patch 
of rather large deciduous trees. Some of 
them, I remember, were red maples, already 



IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 21 

full of handsome, higli-colored fruit. As I 
drew near, I heard indistinctly from among 
them what might have been the song of a 
black-throated green warbler, a bird that 
would have made a valued addition to my 
Florida list, especially at that early date.^ 
No sooner was the song repeated, however, 
than I saw that I had beep, deceived ; it was 
something I had never heard before. But 
it certainly had much of the black-throated 
green's quality, and without question was 
the note of a warbler of some kind. What 
a shame if the bird should give me the slip ! 
Meanwhile, it kept on singing at brief inter- 
vals, and was not so far away but that, with 
my glass, I should be well able to make it 
out, if only I could once get my eyes on it. 
That was the difficulty. Something stirred 
among the branches. Yes, a yellow-throated 
warbler (^Dendroica dominica)^ a bird of 
which I had seen my first specimens, all 
of them silent, during the last eight days. 
Probably he was the singer. I hoped so, at 
any rate. That would be an ideal case of a 

1 As it was, I did not find Dendroica virens in Florida. 
On my way home, in Atlanta, April 20, 1 saw one bird in 
a dooryard shade-tree. 



22 IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 

beautiful bird with a song to match. I kept 
him under my glass, and presently the strain 
was repeated, but not by him. Then it 
ceased, and I was none the wiser. Perhaps 
I never should be. It was indeed a shame. 
Such a taking song ; so simple, and yet so 
pretty, and so thoroughly distinctive. I 
wrote it down thus : tee-hoi^ tee-koo^ — two 
couplets, the first syllable of each a little 
emphasized and dwelt upon, not drawled, 
and a little higher in pitch than its fellow. 
Perhaps it might be expressed thus : — 



f 



:^e3 



I cannot profess to be sure of that, however, 
nor have I unqualified confidence in the 
adequacy of musical notation, no matter 
how skillfully employed, to convey a truthful 
idea of any bird song. 

The affair remained a mystery till, in 
Daytona, nine days afterward, the same 
notes were heard again, this time in lower 
trees that did not stand in deep water. Then 
it transpired that my mysterious warbler was 
not a warbler at all, but the Carolina chicka- 
dee. That was an outcome quite unexpected, 



IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 23 

althougli I now remembered that chickadees 
were in or near the St. Augustine swamp ; 
and what was more to the purpose, I could 
now discern some relationship between the 
tee-koi^ tee-hoo (or, as I now wrote it, see-tol^ 
see-too^, and the familiar so-called phcebe 
whistle of the black-capped titmouse. The 
Southern bird, I am bound to acknowledge, 
is much the more accomplished singer of the 
two. Sometimes he repeats the second dis- 
syllable, making six notes in all. At other 
times he breaks out with a characteristic 
volley of fine chickadee notes, and runs with- 
out a break into the see-toi, see-too, with a 
highly pleasing effect. Then if, on the top 
of this, he doubles the see-too, we have a really 
prolonged and elaborate musical effort, quite 
putting into the shade our New England 
bird's hea7% hear me, sweet and welcome as 
that always is. 

The Southern chickadee, it should be said, 
is not to be distinguished from its Northern 
relative — in the bush, I mean — except by 
its notes. It is slightly smaller, like South- 
ern birds in general, but is practically iden- 
tical in plumage. Apart from its song, what 
most impressed me was its scarcity. It was 



24 IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 

found, sooner or later, wherever I went, I be- 
lieve, but always in surprisingly small num- 
bers, and I saw only one nest. That was 
built in a roadside china-tree in Tallahassee, 
and contained young ones (April 17), as was 
clear from the conduct of its owners. 

It must not be supj)osed that I left St. 
Augustine without another search for my 
unknown " warbler." The very next morn- 
ing found me again at the swamj), where for 
at least an hour I sat and listened. I heard 
no tee-koi, tee-7wo, but was rewarded twice 
over for my walk. In the first place, before 
reaching the swamp, I found the third of my 
flat-wood novelties, the red-cockaded wood- 
pecker. As had happened with the nuthatch 
and the sparrow, I heard him before seeing 
him : first some notes, which by themselves 
would hardly have suggested a woodpecker 
origin, and then a noise of hammering. 
Taken together, the two sounds left little 
doubt as to their author ; and presently I 
saw him, — or rather them, for there were 
two birds. I learned nothing about them, 
either then or afterwards (I saw perhaps 
eight individuals during my ten weeks' 
visit), but it was worth something barely to 



IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 25 

see and hear them. Henceforth Dryohates 
horealis is a bird, and not merely a name. 
This, as I have said, was among the 
pines, before reaching the swamp. In the 
swamp itself, there suddenly appeared from 
somewhere, as if by magic (a dramatic en- 
trance is not without its value, even out-of- 
doors), a less novel but far more impressive 
figure, a pileated woodpecker ; a truly sj^len- 
did fellow, with the scarlet cheek-patches. 
When I caught sight of him, he stood on one 
of the upper branches of a tall j)ine, look- 
ing wonderfully alert and wide-awake ; now 
stretching out his scrawny neck, and now 
drawing it in again, his long crest all the 
while erect and flaming. After a little he 
dropped into the underbrush, out of which 
came at intervals a succession of raps. I 
would have given something to have had 
him under my glass just then, for I had long 
felt curious to see him in the act of chiseling 
out those big, oblong, clean-cut, sharp-angled 
" peck-holes " which, close to the base of the 
tree, make so common and notable a feature 
of Vermont and New Hampshire forests ; but, 
though I did my best, I could not find him, 
till all at once he came up again and took to 



26 IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 

a tall pine, — tlie tallest in the wood, — where 
he pranced about for a while, striking sundry 
picturesque but seemingly aimless attitudes, 
and then made off for good. All in all, he 
was a wild-looking bird, if ever I saw one. 

I was no sooner in St. Augustine, of course, 
than my eyes were open for wild flowers. 
Perhaps I felt a little disappointed. Cer- 
tainly the land was not ablaze with color. 
In the grass about the old fort there was 
plenty of the yellow oxalis and the creeping 
white houstonia ; and from a crevice in the 
wall, out of reach, leaned a stalk of golden- 
rod in full bloom. The reader may smile, 
if he will, but this last flower was a surprise 
and a stumbling-block. A vernal goldenrod ! 
Dr. Chapman's Flora made no mention of 
such an anomaly. Sow thistles, too, looked 
strangely anachronistic. I had never thought 
of them as harbingers of springtime. The 
truth did not break upon me till a week 
or so afterward. Then, on the way to the 
beach at Daytona, where the pleasant penin- 
sula road traverses a thick forest of short- 
leaved pines, every tree of which leans heav- 
ily inland at the same angle ("the leaning 
pines of Daytona," I always said to myself, 



IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 27 

as I passed), I came upon some white beg- 
gar's-ticks, — like daisies ; and as I stopped 
to see what they were, I noticed the presence 
of ripe seeds. The plant had been in flower 
a longtime. And then I laughed at my own 
dullness. It fairly deserved a medal. As 
if, even in Massachusetts, autumnal flowers 
— the groundsel, at least — did not some- 
times persist in blossoming far into the win- 
ter ! A day or two after this, I saw a mullein 
stalk still presenting arms, as it were (the 
mullein always looks the soldier to me), with 
one bright flower. If I had found that in 
St. Augustine, I flatter myself I should have 
been less easily fooled. 

There were no such last-year relics in the 
flat-woods, so far as I remember, but spring 
blossoms were beginning to make their 
appearance there by the middle of February, 
particidarly along the railroad, — violets in 
abundance (^ Viola cucuUata'), dwsiri orange- 
colored dandelions (^Krigia), the Judas- 
tree, or redbud, St. Peter's-wort, blackberry, 
the yellow star-flower {Hypoxis jiincea) ^ and 
butterworts. I recall, too, in a swampy spot, 
a fine fresh tuft of the golden club, with its 
gorgeous yellow spadix, — a plant that I had 



28 IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 

never seen in bloom before, although I had 
once admired a Cape Cod " hollow " full of 
the rank tropical leaves. St. Peter's-wort, 
a low shrub, thrives everywhere in the pine 
barrens, and, without being especially attrac- 
tive, its rather sparse yellow flowers — not 
unlike the St. John's-wort — do something to 
enliven the general waste. The butterworts 
are beauties, and true children of the spring. 
I picked my first ones, which by chance were 
of the smaller purple species (^Pinguicula 
pumila)^ on my way down from the woods, 
on a moist bank. At that moment a white 
man came up the road. " What do you call 
this flower ? " said I. " Valentine's flower," 
he answered at once. "Ah," said I, "be- 
cause it is in bloom on St. Valentine's Day, 
I suppose ? " " No, sir," he said. " Do you 
speak Spanish ? " I had to shake my head. 
" Because I could explain it better in Span- 
ish," he continued, as if by way of apology ; 
but he went on in perfectly good English : 
" If you put one of them under your pillow, 
and think of some one you would like very 
much to see, — some one who has been dead 
a long time, — you will be likely to dream of 
him. It is a very pretty flower," he added. 



IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 29 

And so it is ; hardly prettier, however, to my 
thinking, than the blossoms of the early 
creeping blackberry (^Ruhiistrimalis). With 
them I fairly fell in love : true white roses, 
I called them, each with its central ring of 
dark purplish stamens ; as beautiful as the 
cloudberry, which once, ten years before, I 
had found on the summit of Mount Clinton, 
in New Hampshire, and refused to believe 
a Huhus, though Dr. Gray's key led me to 
that genus again and again. There is some- 
thing in a name, say what you will. 

Some weeks later, and a little farther 
south, — in the flat-woods behind New 
Smyrna, — I saw other flowers, but never 
anything of that tropical exuberance at which 
the average Northern tourist expects to find 
himself staring. Boggy places were full of 
blue iris (the common /ris versicolor of New 
England, but of ranker growth), and here 
and there a pool was yellow with bladder- 
wort. I was taken also with the larger 
and taller (yellow) butterwort, which I 
used never to see as I went through the 
woods in the morning, but was sure to find 
standing in the tall dry grass along the 
border of the sandy road, here one and 



30 IN TUE FLAT-WOODS. 

there one, on my return at noon. In simi- 
lar places grew a "yellow daisy" (^Lepto- 
poda^, a single big head, of a deep color, 
at the top of a leafless stem. It seemed to 
be one of the most abundant of Florida 
spring flowers, but I could not learn that it 
went by any distinctive vernacular name. 
Beside the railway track were blue-eyed 
grass and pipewort, and a dainty blue lobelia 
(iy. Feayana)^ with once in a while an ex- 
tremely pretty coreopsis, having a purple 
centre, and scarcely to be distinguished from 
one that is common in gardens. No doubt 
the advancing season brings an increasing 
wealth of such beauty to the flat-woods. 
No doubt, too, I missed the larger half of 
what might have been found even at the 
time of my visit; for I made no pretense 
of doing any real botanical work, having 
neither the time nor the equipment. The 
birds kept me busy, for the most part, when 
the country itseK did not absorb my at- 
tention. 

More interesting, and a thousand times 
more memorable, than any flower or bird 
was the pine barren itself. I have given no 
true idea of it, I am perfectly aware : open, 



IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 31 

parklike, flooded with sunshine, level as a 
floor. "What heartache," Lanier breaks 
out, poor exile, dying of consumption, — 
" what heartache ! Ne'er a hill ! " A dreary 
country to ride through, hour after hour ; an 
impossible country to live in, but most 
pleasant for a half-day winter stroll. Not- 
withstanding I never went far into it, as I 
have already said, I had always a profound 
sensation of remoteness ; as if I might go 
on forever, and be no farther away. 

Yet even here I had more than one re- 
minder that the world is a small place. I 
met a burly negro in a cart, and fell into 
talk with him about the Florida climate, an 
endless topic, out of which a cynical traveler 
may easily extract almost endless amuse- 
ment. How about the summers here ? I 
inquired. Were they really as paradisaical 
(I did not use that word) as some reports 
would lead one to sup230se ? The man smiled, 
as if he had heard something like that before. 
He did not think the Florida summer a dream 
of delight, even on the east coast. " I 'm 
tellin' you the truth, sah ; the mosquiters an' 
sandflies is awful." Was he born here? I 
No; he came from B , Ala- 



32 IN THE FLAT-WOODS. 

bama. Everybody in eastern Florida came 
from somewliere, as well as I could make out. 

" Oil, from B ," said I. " Did you know 

Mr. W , of the Iron Works?" 

He smiled again. " Yes, sali ; I used to 
work for him. He 's a nice man." He spoke 
the truth that time beyond a peradventure. 
He was healthier here than in the other 
place, he thought, and wages were higher ; 
but he liked the other place better " for 
pleasure." It was an odd coincidence, was 
it not, that I should meet in this solitude a 
man who knew the only citizen of Alabama 
with whom I was ever acquainted. 

At another time I fell in with an oldish 
colored man, who, like myself, had taken to 
the woods for a quiet Sunday stroll. He was 
from Mississippi, he told me. Oh, yes, he 
remembered the war ; he was a slave, twenty- 
one years old, when it broke out. To his 
mind, the present generation of " niggers " 
were a pretty poor lot, for all their " edica- 
tion." He had seen them crowding folks off 
the sidewalk, and puffing smoke in their 
faces. All of which was nothing new ; I had 
found that story more or less common among 
negroes of his age. He did n't believe much 



IN THE FLAT-WOODS, 33 

in " edication ; " but wlien I asked if he 
thought the blacks were better off in slavery 
times, he answered quickly, " I 'd rather be 
a free man, / had." He was n't married ; 
he had plenty to do to take care of himself. 
We separated, he going one way and I the 
other; but he turned to ask, with much 
seriousness (the reader must remember that 
this was only three months after a national 
election), " Do you think they 'U get free 
trade ? " " Truly," said I to myself, " ' the 
world is too much with us.' Even in the 
flat-woods there is no escaping the tariff ques- 
tion." But I answered, in what was meant 
to be a reassuring tone, " Not yet awhile. 
Some time." " I hope not," he said, — as if 
liberty to buy and sell would be a dreadful 
blow to a man living in a shanty in a Florida 
pine barren! He was taking the matter 
rather too much to heart, perhaps; but 
surely it was encouraging to see such a man 
interested in broad economical questions, and 
I realized as never before the truth of what 
the newspapers so continually tell us, that 
political campaigns are educational. 



BESIDE THE MARSH. 

I AM sitting u23on the upland bank of a 
narrow winding creek. Before me is a sea 
of grass, brown and green of many shades. 
To the north the marsh is bounded by live- 
oak woods, — a line with numberless inden- 
tations, — beyond which runs the Matanzas 
River, as I know by the passing and repass- 
ing of sails behind the trees. Eastward are 
sand-hills, dazzling white in the sun, with a 
ragged green fringe along their tops. Then 
comes a stretch of the open sea, and then, 
more to the south, St. Anastasia Island, with 
its tall black-and-white lighthouse and the 
cluster of lower buildings at its base. Small 
sailboats, and now and then a tiny steamer, 
pass up and down the river to and from St. 
Augustine. 

A delicious south wind is blowing (it is 
the 15th of February), and I sit in the shade 
of a cedar-tree and enjoy the air and the 
scene. A contrast, this, to the frozen world 
I was living in, less than a week ago. 



BESIDE THE MARSH. 35 

As I approached the creek, a single spotted 
sandpiper was teetering along the edge of 
the water, and the next moment a big blue 
heron rose just beyond him and went flap- 
ping away to the middle of the marsh. Now, 
an hour afterward, he is still standing there, 
towering above the tall grass. Once when I 
turned that way I saw, as I thought, a stake, 
and then something moved upon it, — a bird 
of some kind. And what an enormous beak ! 
I raised my field-glass. It was the heron. 
His body was the post, and his head was the 
bird. Meanwhile, the sandpiper has stolen 
away, I know not when or where. He must 
have omitted the tweet^ tioeet., with which 
ordinarily he signalizes his flight. He is the 
first of his kind that I have seen during my 
brief stay in these parts. 

Now a multitude of crows pass over ; fish 
crows, I think they must be, from their small 
size and their strange, ridiculous voices. And 
now a second great blue heron comes in sight, 
and keeps on over the marsh and over the 
live-oak wood, on his way to the San Sebas- 
tian marshes, or some point still more remote. 
A fine show he makes, with his wide expanse 
of wing, and his feet drawn up and standing 



36 BESIDE THE MARSH, 

out behind him. Next a marsh hawk in 
brown plumage comes skimming over the 
grass. This way and that he swerves in ever 
graceful lines. For one to whom ease and 
grace come by nature, even the chase of 
meadow mice is an act of beauty, while an- 
other goes awkwardly though in pursuit of a 
goddess. 

Several times I have noticed a kingfisher 
hovering above the grass (so it looks, but no 
doubt he is over an arm of the creek), strik- 
ing the air with quick strokes, and keeping 
his head* pointed downward, after the manner 
of a tern. Then he disappeared while I was 
looking at something else. Now I remark 
him sitting motionless upon the top of a post 
in the midst of the marsh. 

A third blue heron appears, and he too 
flies over without stopping. Number One 
still keeps his place ; through the glass I can 
see him dressing his feathers with his clumsy 
beak. The lively strain of a white-eyed vireo, 
pertest of songsters, comes to me from some- 
where on my right, and the soft chipping of 
myrtle warblers is all but incessant. I look 
up from my paper to see a turkey buzzard 
sailing majestically northward. I watch him 



BESIDE THE MABSH. 37 

till lie fades in the distance. Not once does 
he flap his wings, but sails and sails, going 
with the wind, yet turning again and again 
to rise against it, — helping himself thus to 
its adverse, uplifting pressure in the place of 
wing-strokes, perhaps, — and passing onward 
all the while in beautiful circles. He, too, 
scavenger though he is, has a genius for be- 
ing graceful. One might almost be willing 
to be a buzzard, to fly like that ! 

The kingfisher and the heron are still at 
their posts. An exquisite yellow butterfly, 
of a sort strange to my Yankee eyes, flits 
past, followed by a red achniral. The marsh 
hawk is on the wing again, and while look- 
ing at him I descry a second hawk, too far 
away to be made out. Now the air behind 
me is dark with crows, — a hundred or two, 
at least, circling over the low cedars. Some 
motive they have for all their clamor, but it 
passes my owlish wisdom to guess what it 
can be. A fourth blue heron appears, and 
drops into the grass out of sight. 

Between my feet is a single blossom of the 
yellow oxalis, the only flower to be seen ; and 
very pretty it is, each petal with an orange 
spot at the base. 



38 BESIDE THE MARSH. 

Anotlier buzzard, another marsh hawk, 
another yellow butterfly, and then a smaller 
one, darker, almost orange. It passes too 
quicldy over the creek and away. The marsh 
hawk comes nearer, and I see the strong yel- 
low tinge of his plumage, especially under- 
neath. He will grow handsomer as he grows 
older. A pity the same could not be true of 
men. Behind me are sharp cries of titlarks. 
From the direction of the river come frequent 
reports of guns. Somebody is doing his best 
to be happy ! All at once I prick uj) my ears. 
From the grass just across the creek rises the 
brief, hurried song of a long-billed marsh 
wren. So he is in Florida, is he ? Already 
I have heard confused noises which I feel 
sure are the work of rails of some kind. No 
doubt there is abundant life concealed in 
those acres on acres of close grass. 

The heron and the kingfisher are still quiet. 
Their morning hunt was successful, and for 
to-day Fate cannot harm them. A buzzard, 
with nervous, rustling beats, goes directly 
above the low cedar under which I am rest- 
ing. 

At last, after a siesta of two hours, the 
heron has changed his place. I looked up 



BESIDE THE MARSH. 39 

just in season to see him sweeping over the 
grass, into which he dropped the next instant. 
The tide is falling. The distant sand-hills 
are winking in the heat, but the breeze is 
deliciously cool, the very perfection of tem- 
perature, if a man is to sit still in the sliade. 
It is eleven o'clock. I have a mile to go in 
the hot sun, and turn away. But first I sweep 
the line once more with my glass. Yonder 
to the south are two more blue herons stand- 
ing in the grass. Perhaps there are more 
still. I sweep the line. Yes, far, far away 
I can see four heads in a row. Heads and 
necks rise above the grass. But so far away ! 
Are they birds, or only posts made alive by 
my imagination? I look again. I believe I 
was deceived. They are nothing but stakes. 
See how in a row they stand. I smile at my- 
self. Just then one of them moves, and an- 
other is pidled down suddenly into the grass. 
I smile again. " Ten great blue herons," I 
say to myself. 

All this has detained me, and meantime 
the kingfisher has taken wing and gone noisily 
up the creek. The marsh hawk appears once 
more. A killdeer's sharp, rasping note — a 
familiar sound in St. Augustine — comes 



40 BESIDE THE MARSH. 

from I know not where. A procession of 
more than twenty black vultures passes over 
my head. I can see their feet drawn up 
under them. My own I must use in plodding 
homeward. 



ON THE BEACH AT DAYTONA. 

The first eight days of my stay in Day- 
tona were so deliglitfiil that I felt as if I 
had never before seen fuie weather, even in 
my dreams. My east window looked across 
the Halifax River to the peninsula woods. 
Beyond them was the ocean. Immediately 
after breakfast, therefore, I made toward the 
north bridge, and in half an hour or less was 
on the beach. Beaches are much the same 
the world over, and there is no need to de- 
scribe this one — Silver Beach, I think I 
heard it called — except to say that it is 
broad, hard, and, for a pleasure-seeker's 
purpose, endless. It is backed by low sand- 
hills covered with impenetrable scrub, — 
oak and palmetto, — beyond which is a 
dense growth of short-leaved pines. Per- 
fect weather, a perfect beach, and no throng 
of people : here were the conditions of hap- 
piness ; and here for eight days I found it. 
The ocean itself was a solitude. Day after 
day not a sail was in sight. Looking up 



42 ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 

and clown tlie beach, I could usually see 
somewhere in the distance a carriage or two, 
and as many foot passengers ; but I often 
walked a mile, or sat for half an hour, with- 
out being within hail of any one. Never 
were airs more gentle or colors more exqui- 
site. 

As for birds, they were surprisingly 
scarce, but never wanting altogether. If 
everything else failed, a few fish-hawks 
were sure to be in sight. I watched them 
at first with eager interest. Up and down 
the beach they went, each by himself, with 
heads pointed downward, scanning the shal- 
low water. Often they stopped in their 
course, and by means of laborious flappings 
held themselves poised over a certain spot. 
Then, perhaps, they set their wings and shot 
downward clean under water. If the plunge 
was unsuccessful, they shook their feathers 
dry and were ready to begin again. They 
had the fisherman's gift. The second, and 
even the third attempt might fail, but no 
matter; it was simply a question of time 
and patience. If the fish was caught, their 
first concern seemed to be to shift their hold 
upon it, till its head pointed to the front. 



ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 43 

That done, they shook themselves vigorously 
and started landward, the shining white vic- 
tim wriggling vainly in the clutch of the tal- 
ons. I took it for granted that they retired 
with their quarry to some secluded spot on 
the peninsula, till one day I happened to be 
standing upon a sand-hill as one passed 
overhead. Then I perceived that he kept 
on straight across the peninsula and the 
river. More than once, however, I saw one 
of them in no haste to go inland. On my 
second visit, a hawk came circling about my 
head, carrying a fish. I was surprised at 
the action, but gave it no second thought, 
nor once imagined that he was making me 
his protector, till suddenly a large bird 
dropped rather awkwardly upon the sand, 
not far before me. He stood for an instant 
on his long, ungainly legs, and then, showing 
a white head and a white tail, rose with a 
fish in his talons, and swept away landward 
out of sight. Here was the osprey's para- 
site, the bald eagle, for which I had been 
on the watch. Meantime, the hawk too 
had disappeared. Whether it was his fish 
which the eagle had picked up (having 
missed it in the air) I cannot say. I did 



44 ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 

not see it fall, and knew nothing of the 
eagle's presence until lie fluttered to the 
beach. 

Some days later, I saw the big thief — 
emblem of American liberty — play his 
sharp game to the finish. I was crossing 
the bridge, and by accident turned and 
looked upward. (By accident, I say, but I 
was always doing it.) High in the air were 
two birds, one chasing the other, — a fish- 
hawk and a young eagle with dark head 
and tail. The hawk meant to save his din- 
ner if he could. Round and round he went, 
ascending at every turn, his pursuer after 
him hotly. For aught I could see, he stood 
a good chance of escape, till all at once 
another pair of wings swept into the field 
of my glass. 

" A third is in the race ! Who is the third, 
Speeding away swift as the eagle bird ? " 

It teas an eagle, an adult, with head and 
tail white. Only once more the osprey cir- 
cled. The odds were against him, and he 
let go the fish. As it fell, the old eagle 
swooped after it, missed it, swooped again, 
and this time, long before it could reach 
the water, had it fast in his claws. Then 



ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 45 

off he went, the younger one in pursuit. 
They passed out of sight behind the trees 
of an island, one close upon the other, and 
I do not know how the controversy ended ; 
but I would have wagered a trifle on the 
old white-head, the bird of Washington. 

The scene reminded me of one I had wit- 
nessed in Georgia a fortnight before, on my 
way south. The train stopped at a back- 
woods station ; some of the passengers gath- 
ered upon the steps of the car, and the 
usual bevy of young negroes came alongside. 
"Stand on my head for a nickel?" said 
one. A passenger put his hand into his 
pocket ; the boy did as he had promised, — 
in no very professional style, be it said, — 
and with a grin stretched out his hand. 
The nickel glistened in the sun, and on 
the instant a second boy sprang forward, 
snatched it out of the sand, and made off 
in triumph amid the hilarious applause of 
his fellows. The acrobat's countenance in- 
dicated a sense of injustice, and I had no 
doubt that my younger eagle was similarly 
affected. " Where is our boasted honor 
among thieves ? " I imagined him asking. 
The bird of freedom is a great bird, and the 



46 ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 

land of the free is a great country. Here, 
let us hope, the parallel ends. Whether 
on the banks of Newfoundland or elsewhere, 
it cannot be that the great republic would 
ever snatch a fish that did not belong to it. 

I admired the address of the fish-hawks 
until I saw the gannets. Then I perceived 
that the hawks, with all their practice, were 
no better than landlubbers. The gannets 
kept farther out at sea. Sometimes a scat- 
tered flock remained in sight for the greater 
part of a forenoon. With their long, sharp 
wings and their outstretched necks, — like 
loons, but with a different flight, — they 
were rakish-looking customers. Sometimes 
from a great height, sometimes from a lower, 
sometimes at an incline, and sometimes ver- 
tically, they plunged into the water, and 
after an absence of some seconds, as it 
seemed, came up and rested upon the sur- 
face. They were too far away to be closely 
observed, and for a time I did not feel cer- 
tain what they were. The larger number 
were in dark plumage, and it was not till 
a white one appeared that I said with as- 
surance, " Gannets I " With the bright 
sun on him, he was indeed a splendid bird, 



ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 47 

snowy white, with the tips of his wings jet 
black. If he would have come inshore like 
the ospreys, I think I should never have 
tired of his evolutions. 

The gannets showed themselves only now 
and then, but the brown pelicans were an 
every-day sight. I had found them first 
on the beach at St. Augustine. Here at 
Daytona they never alighted on the sand, 
and seldom in the water. They were always 
flying up or down the beach, and, unless 
turned from their course by the presence of 
some suspicious object, they kept straight on 
just above the breakers, rising and falling 
with the waves ; now appearing above them, 
and now out of sight in the trough of the 
sea. Sometimes a single bird passed, but 
commonly they were in small flocks. Once 
I saw seventeen together, — a pretty long 
procession ; for, whatever their number, they 
went always in Indian file. Evidently some 
dreadful thing would happen if two pelicans 
should ever travel abreast. It was partly 
this unusual order of march, I suspect, which 
gave such an air of preternatural gravity 
to their movements. It was impossible to 
see even two of them go by without feeling 



48 ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 

almost as if I were in cliurch. First, both 
birds flew a rod or two with slow and stately- 
flappings; then, as if at some preconcerted 
signal, both set their wings and scaled for 
about the same distance ; then they resumed 
their wing strokes ; and so on, till they passed 
out of sight. I never heard them utter a 
sound, or saw them make a movement of any 
sort (I speak of what I saw at Daytona) ex- 
cept to fly straight on, one behind another. 
If church ceremonials are still open to amend- 
ment, I would suggest, in no spirit of irrev- 
erence, that a study of pelican processionals 
would be certain to yield edifying results. 
Nothing done in any cathedral could be more 
solemn. Indeed, their solemnity was so great 
that I came at last to find it almost ridiculous ; 
but that, of course, was only from a want of 
faith on the part of the beholder. The birds, 
as I say, were hrown pelicans. Had they 
been of the other species, in churchly white 
and black, the ecclesiastical effect would per- 
haps have been lieightened, though such a 
thing is hardly conceivable. 

Some beautiful little gulls, peculiarly dainty 
in their appearance (" Bonaparte's gidls," 
they are called in books, but "surf gulls" 



ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A 49 

would be a prettier and apter name), were 
also given to flying along the breakers, but 
in a manner very different from the pelicans' ; 
as different, I may say, as the birds them- 
selves. They, too, moved steadily onward, 
north or south as the case might be, but fed 
as they went, dropping into the shallow wa- 
ter between the incoming waves, and rising 
again to escape the next breaker. The ac- 
tion was characteristic and graceful, though 
often somewhat nervous and hurried. I no- 
ticed that the birds commonly went by twos, 
but that may have been nothing more than 
a coincidence. Beside these small surf gulls, 
never at all numerous, I usually saw a few 
terns, and now and then one or two rather 
large gulls, which, as well as I oould make 
out, must have been the ring-billed. It was 
a strange beach, I thought, where fish-hawks 
invariably outnumbered both gulls and terns. 
Of beach birds, properly so called, I saw 
none but sanderlings. They were no novelty, 
but I always stopped to look at them ; busy 
as ants, rmming in a body down the beach 
after a receding wave, and the next moment 
scampering back again with all speed before 
an incoming one. They tolerated no near 



50 ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 

approach, but were at once on tlie wing for a 
long flight up or down the coast, looking like 
a flock of snow-white birds as they turned 
their under parts to the sun in rising above 
the breakers. Their manner of feeding, with 
the head pitched forward, and a quick, eager 
movement, as if they had eaten nothing for 
days, and were fearful that their present bit 
of good fortune would not last, is strongly 
characteristic, so that they can be recognized 
a long way off. As I have said, they were 
the only true beach birds ; but I rarely failed 
to see one or two great blue herons playing 
that role. The first one filled me with sur- 
prise. I had never thought of finding him 
in such a place ; but there he stood, and be- 
fore I was done with Florida beaches I had 
come to look upon him as one of their most 
constant hahitues. In truth, this largest 
of the herons is well-nigh omnipresent in 
Florida. Wherever there is water, fresh or 
salt, he is certain to be met with sooner or 
later; and even in the driest place, if you 
stay there long enough, you wil] be likely 
to see him passing overhead, on his way 
to the water, which is nowhere far off. On 
the beach, as everywhere else, he is a model 



ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 51 

of patience. To the best of my recollection, 
I never saw him catch a fish there ; and I 
really came to think it pathetic, the persis- 
tency with which he would stand, with the 
water half way to his knees, leaning for- 
ward expectantly toward the breakers, as 
if he felt that this great and generous ocean, 
which had so many fish to spare, could not 
fail to send him, at last, the morsel for which 
he was waiting. 

But indeed I was not long in perceiving 
that the Southern climate made patience a 
comparatively easy virtue, and fishing, by a 
natural consequence, a favorite avocation. 
Day after day, as I crossed the bridges on 
my way to and from the beach, the same men 
stood against the rail, holding their poles over 
the river. They had an air of having been 
there all winter. I came to recognize them, 
though I knew none of their names. One 
was peculiarly happy looking, almost radiant, 
with an educated face, and only one hand. 
His disability hindered him, no doubt. I 
never saw so much as a sheep-head or a drum 
lying at his feet. But inwardly, I felt sure, 
his luck was good. Another was older, fifty 
at least, sleek and well dressed. He spoke 



62 ON THE BEACH AT DAY TON A, 

pleasantly enough, if I addressed him ; other- 
wise he attended strictly to business. Every 
day he was there, morning and afternoon. 
He, I think, had better fortune than any of 
the others. Once I saw him land a large 
and handsome " speckled trout," to the un- 
mistakable envy of his brother anglers. Still 
a third was a younger man, with a broad- 
brimmed straw hat and a taciturn habit; 
no less persevering than Nvunber Two, per- 
haps, but far less successful. I marveled a 
little at their enthusiasm (there were many 
beside these), and they, in their turn, did 
not altogether conceal their amusement at 
the foibles of a man, still out of Bedlam, who 
walked and walked and walked, always with 
a field-glass protruding from his side pocket, 
which now and then he pulled out suddenly 
and leveled at nothing. It is one of the 
merciful ameliorations of this present evil 
world that men are thus mutually entertain- 
ing. 

These anglers were to be congratulated. 
Ordered South by their physicians, — as most 
of them undoubtedly were, — compelled to 
spend the winter away from friends and busi- 
ness, amid all the discomforts of Southern 



ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 53 

hotels, tliey were happy in having at least 
one thing which they loved to do. Blessed 
is the invalid who has an outdoor hobby. 
One man, whom I met more than once in 
my beach rambles, seemed to devote himself 
to bathing, running, and walking. He looked 
like an athlete ; I heard him tell how far 
he could run without getting " winded ; " and 
as he sprinted up and down the sand in his 
scanty bathing costmne, I always found him 
a pleasing spectacle. Another runner there 
gave me a half -hour of amusement that turned 
at the last to a feeling of almost painful 
sympathy. He was not in bathing costume, 
nor did he look particularly athletic. He 
was teaching his young lady to ride a bicycle, 
and his pupil was at that most interesting 
stage of a learner's career when the machine 
is beginning to steady itself. With a very 
little assistance she went bravely, while at the 
same time the young man felt it necessary 
not to let go his hold upon her for more than 
a few moments at once. At all events, he 
must be with her at the turn. She plied the 
pedals with vigor, and he ran alongside or 
behind, as best he coidd ; she excited, and 
he out of breath. Back and forth they went, 



54 ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 

and it was a relief to me when finally he took 
off his coat. I left him still panting in his 
fair one's wake, and hoped it would not turn 
out a case of "love's labor 's lost." Let us 
hope, too, that he was not an invalid. 

While speaking of these my companions 
in idleness, I may as well mention an older 
man, — a rural philosopher, he seemed, — 
whom I met again and again, always in search 
of shells. He was from Indiana, he told me 
with agreeable garrulity. His grandchildren 
would like the shells. He had perhaps made 
a mistake in coming so far south. It was 
pretty warm, he thought, and he feared the 
change would be too great when he went 
home again. If a man's lungs were bad, he 
ought to go to a warm place, of course. He 
came for his stomach, which was now pretty 
well, — a capital proof of the superior value 
of fresh air over "proper " food in dyspeptic 
troubles; for if there is anywhere in the 
world a place in which a delicate stomach 
would fare worse than in a Southern hotel, 
— of the second or third class, — may none 
but my enemies ever find it. Seashell col- 
lecting is not a panacea. For a disease like 
old age, for instance, it might prove to be an 



ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 55 

alleviation rather than a cure ; but taken 
long enough, and with a sufficient mixture of 
enthusiasm, — a true sine qua non, — it will 
be found efficacious, I believe, in all ordinary 
cases of dyspepsia. 

My Indiana man was far from being alone 
in his cheerful pursuit. If strangers, men or 
women, met me on the beach and wished to 
say something more than good-morning, they 
were sure to ask, " Have you found any 
pretty shells ? " One woman was a collector 
of a more businesslike turn. She had 
brought a camp-stool, and when I first saw 
her in the distance was removing her shoes, 
and putting on rubber boots. Then she 
moved her stool into the surf, sat upon it 
with a tin pail beside her, and, leaning for- 
ward over the water, fell to doing something, 
— I could not tell what. She was so indus- 
trious that I did not venture to disturb her, 
as I passed ; but an hour or two afterward 
I overtook her going homeward across the 
peninsula with her invalid husband, and she 
showed me her pail full of the tiny coquina 
clams, which she said were very nice for soup, 
as indeed I knew. Some days later, I found 
a man collecting them for the market, with 



56 ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 

tlie lielp of a horse and a cylindrical wire 
roller. With his trousers rolled to his knees, 
he waded in the surf, and shoveled the in- 
coming water and sand into the wire roller 
through an aperture left for that purpose. 
Then he closed the aperture, and drove the 
horse back and forth through the breakers 
till the clams were washed clear of the sand, 
after which he poured them out into a shal- 
low tray like a long bread-pan, and trans- 
ferred them from that to a big bag. I came 
up just in time to see them in the tray, bright 
with all the colors of the rainbow. " Will 
you hold the bag open ? " he said. I was 
glad to help (it was perhaps the only useful 
ten minutes that I passed in Florida) ; and 
so, counting quart by quart, he dished them 
into it. There were thirty odd quarts, but 
he wanted a bushel and a quarter, and again 
took up the shovel. The clams themselves 
were not canned and shipped, he said, but 
only the " juice." 

Many rudely built cottages stood on the 
sand-hills just behind the beach, especially 
at the points, a mile or so apart, where 
the two Daytona bridge roads come out of 
the scrub ; and one day, while walking up the 



ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 57 

beach to Ormond, I saw before me a miicli 
more elaborate Queen Anne house. Fanci- 
fully but rather neatly painted, and with a 
stable to match, it looked like an exotic. As 
I drew near, its venerable owner was at work 
in front of it, shoveling a path through the 
sand, — just as, at that moment (February 
24), thousands of Yankee householders were 
shoveling paths through the snow, which 
then was reported by the newspapers to be 
seventeen inches deep in the streets of Boston. 
His reverend air and his long black coat pro- 
claimed him a clergyman past all possibility 
of doubt. He seemed to have got to heaven 
before death, the place was so attractive ; but 
being still in a body terrestrial, he may have 
fomid the meat market rather distant, and 
mosquitoes and sand-flies sometimes a plague. 
As I walked up the beach, he drove by me 
in an open wagon with a hired man. They 
kept on till they came to a log which had 
been cast up by the sea, and evidently had 
been sighted from the house. The hired man 
lifted it into the wagon, and they drove 
back, — quite a stirring adventure, I im- 
agined ; an event to date from, at the very 
least. 



58 ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 

The smaller cottages were nearly all empty 
at tliat season. At different times I made 
use of many of tliem, when the sun was hot, 
or I had been long afoot. Once I was rest- 
ing thus on a flight of front steps, when a 
three-seated carriage came down the beach 
and pulled up opposite. The driver wished 
to ask me a question, I thought ; no doubt I 
looked very much at home. From the day I 
had entered Florida, every one I met had 
seemed to know me intuitively for a New 
Englander, and most of them — I could not 
imao-ine how — had divined that I came from 
Boston. It gratified me to believe that I 
was losing a little of my provincial manner, 
under the influence of more extended travel. 
But my pride had a sudden fall. The car- 
riage stopped, as I said ; but instead of in- 
quiring the way, the driver alighted, and all 
the occupants of the carriage proceeded to 
do the same, — eight women, with baskets 
and sundries. It was time for me to be start- 
ing. I descended the steps, and pulled off 
my hat to the first comer, who turned out to 
be the proprietor of the establishment. With 
a gracious smile, she hoped they were " not 
frightening me away." She and her friends 



ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 59 

had come for a day's picnic at the cottage. 
Things being as they were (eight women), 
she could hardly invite me to share the fes- 
tivities, and, with my best apology for the 
intrusion, I withdrew. 

Of one building on the sand-hills I have 
peculiarly pleasant recollections. It was not 
a cottage, but had evidently been put up as 
a public resort; especially, as I inferred, 
for Sunday-school or parish picnics. It was 
furnished with a platform for speech-making 
(is there any foolishness that men will not 
commit on sea beaches and mountain tops?), 
and, what was more to my purpose, was 
open on three sides. I passed a good deal 
of time there, first and last, and once it 
sheltered me from a drenching shower of 
an hour or two. The lightning was vivid, 
and the rain fell in sheets. In the midst of 
the blackness and commotion, a single tern, 
ghostly white, flew past, and toward the 
close a bunch of sanderlings came down the 
edge of the breakers, still looking for some- 
thing to eat. The only other living things 
in sight were two young fellows, who had 
improved the opportunity to try a dip in the 
surf. Their color indicated that they were 



60 ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 

not yet hardened to open-air bathing, and 
from their actions it was evident that they 
found the ocean cool. They were wet enough 
before they were done, but it was mostly 
with fresh water. Probably they took no 
harm ; but I am moved to remark, in pass- 
ing, that I sometimes wondered how gen- 
erally physicians who order patients to 
Florida for the winter caution them against 
imprudent exposure. To me, who am no 
doctor, it seemed none too safe for young 
women with consumptive tendencies to be out 
sailing in open boats on winter evenings, no 
matter how warm the afternoon had been, 
while I saw one case where a surf bath taken 
by such an invalid was followed by a day of 
prostration and fever. " We who live here," 
said a resident, "don't think the water is 
warm enough yet; but for these Northern 
folks it is a great thing to go into the surf 
in February, and you can't keep them out." 
The rows of cottages of which I have 
spoken were in one sense a detriment to the 
beach ; but on the whole, and in their pres- 
ent deserted condition, I found them an 
advantage. It was easy enough to walk 
away from them, if a man wanted the feel- 



ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 61 

ing of utter solitude (the beach extends 
from Matanzas Inlet to Mosquito Inlet, 
thirty-five miles, more or less) ; while at 
other times they not only furnished shadow 
and a seat, but, with the paths and little 
clearings behind them, were an attraction 
to many birds. Here I found my first 
Florida jays. They sat on the chimney- 
tops and ridgepoles, and I was rejoiced to 
discover that these unique and interesting 
creatures, one of the special objects of my 
journey South, were not only common, but 
to an extraordinary degree approachable. 
Their extreme confidence in man is one of 
their oddest characteristics. I heard from 
more than one person how easily and "in 
almost no time " they could be tamed, if 
indeed they needed taming. A resident of 
Hawks Park told me that they used to come 
into his house and stand upon the corners 
of the dinner table waiting for their share 
of the meal. When he was hoeing in the 
garden, they would perch on his hat, and 
stay there by the hour, unless he drove them 
off. He never did anything to tame them 
except to treat them kindly. When a brood 
was old enough to leave the nest, the parents 



62 ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 

brought the youngsters up to the doorstep 
as a matter of course. 

The Florida jay, a bird of the scrub, is 
not to be confounded with the Florida bhce 
jay (a smaller and less conspicuously crested 
duplicate of our common Northern bird), 
to which it bears little resemblance either 
in personal appearance or in voice. Seen 
from behind, its aspect is peculiarly strik- 
ing ; the head, wings, rump, and tail being 
dark blue, with an almost rectangular patch 
of gray set in the midst. Its beak is very 
stout, and its tail very long ; and though it 
would attract attention anywhere, it is hardly 
to be called handsome or graceful. Its 
notes — such of them as I heard, that is — 
are mostly guttural, with little or nothing of 
the screaming quality which distinguishes 
the blue jay's voice. To my ear they were 
often suggestive of the Northern shrike. 

On the 23d of February I was standing 
on the rear piazza of one of the cottages, 
when a jay flew into the oak and palmetto 
scrub close by. A second glance, and I saw 
that she was busy upon a nest. When she 
had gone, I moved nearer, and waited. She 
did not return, and I descended the steps 



ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 63 

and went to the edge of the thicket to in- 
spect her work : a bulky affair, — nearly 
done, I thought, — loosely constructed of 
pretty large twigs. I had barely returned 
to the veranda before the bird appeared 
again. This time I was in a position to 
look squarely in upon her. She had some 
difficulty in edging her way through the 
dense bushes with a long, branching stick 
in her bill ; but she accomplished the feat, 
fitted the new material into its place, re- 
adjusted the other twigs a bit here and 
there, and then, as she rose to depart, she 
looked me suddenly in the face and stopped, 
as much as to say, " "Well, well ! here 's a 
pretty go ! A man spying upon me ! " I 
wondered whether she would throw up the 
work, but in another minute she was back 
again with another twig. The nest, I should 
have said, was about four feet from the 
ground, and perhaps twenty feet from the 
cottage. Four days later, I found her sit- 
ting upon it. She flew off as I came up, 
and I pushed into the scrub far enough to 
thrust my hand into the nest, which, to my 
disappointment, was empty. In fact, it was 
still far from completed ; for on the 3d of 



64 ON THE BEACH AT DAYTONA. 

March, when I paid it a farewell visit, its 
owner was still at work lining it with fine 
grass. At that time it was a comfort- 
able-looking and really elaborate structure. 
Both the birds came to look at me as I stood 
on the piazza. They perched together on 
the top of a stake so narrow that there was 
scarcely room for their feet; and as they 
stood thus, side by side, one of them struck 
its beak several times against the beak of 
the other, as if in play. I wished them joy 
of their expected progeny, and was the more 
ready to believe they would have it for this 
little display of sportive sentimentality. 

It was a distinguished company that fre- 
quented that row of narrow back yards on 
the edge of the sand-hills. As a new-comer, 
I found the jays (^sometimes there were ten 
under my eye at once) the most entertain- 
ing members of it, but if I had been a 
dweller there for the summer, I should per- 
haps have altered my opinion ; for the group 
contained four of the finest of Floridian 
songsters, — the mocking-bird, the brown 
thrasher, the cardinal grosbeak, and the 
Carolina wren. Rare morning and evening 
concerts those cottagers must have. And 



ON THE BEACH AT DAYTONA. 65 

besides these there were catbirds, ground 
doves, red-eyed chewinks, white-eyed che- 
winks, a song sparrow (one of the few that 
I saw in Florida), savanna sparrows, myrtle 
birds, redpoll warblers, a phcebe, and two 
flickers. The last-named birds, by the way, 
are never backward about displaying their 
tender feelings. A treetop flirtation is their 
special delight (I hope my readers have all 
seen one ; few things of the sort are better 
worth looking at), and here, in the absence 
of trees, they had taken to the ridgepole of 
a house. 

More than once I remarked white-breasted 
swallows straggling northward along the line 
of sand-hills. They were in loose order, but 
the movement was plainly concerted, with 
all the look of a vernal migration. This 
swallow, the flrst of its family to arrive in 
New England, remains in Florida through- 
out the winter, but is known also to go as 
far south as Central America. The purple 
martins — which, so far as I am aware, do 
not winter in Florida — had already begun 
to make their appearance. While crossing 
the bridge, February 22, I was surprised to 
notice two of them sitting upon a bird-box 



66 ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 

over the draw, which just then stood open 
for the passage of a tug-boat. The toll- 
gatherer told me they had come " from some 
place " eight or ten days before. His atten- 
tion had been called to them by his cat, who 
was trying to get up to the box to bid them 
welcome. He believed that she discovered 
them within three minutes of their arrival. 
It seemed not unlikely. In its own way a 
cat is a pretty sharp ornithologist. 

One or two cormorants were almost al- 
ways about the river. Sometimes they sat 
upon stakes in a patriotic, spread-eagle 
(American eagle) attitude, as if drying 
their wings, — a curious sight till one be- 
came accustomed to it. Snakebirds and 
buzzards resort to the same device, but I 
cannot recall ever seeing any Northern bird 
thus engaged. From the south bridge I one 
morning saw, to my great satisfaction, a 
couple of white pelicans, the only ones that 
I found in Florida, though I was assured 
that within twenty years they had been com- 
mon along the Halifax and Hillsborough 
rivers. My birds were flying up the river 
at a good height. The brown pelicans, on 
the other hand, made their daily pilgrimages 



ON THE BEACH AT DAYTON A. 67 

just above the level of the water, as has 
been already described, and were never ove« 
the river, but off the beach. 

All in all, there are few pleasanter walks 
in Florida, I believe, than the beach-round 
at Dajtona, out by one bridge and back by 
the other. An old hotel-keeper — a rural 
Yankee, if one could tell anything by his 
look and speech — said to me in a burst of 
confidence, " Yes, we 've got a climate, and 
that 's about all we have got, — climate and 
sand." I could not entirely agree with him. 
For myself, I found not only fine days, but 
fine prospects. But there was no denying 
the sand. 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

Wherever a walker lives, he finds sooner 
or later one favorite road. So it was with 
me at New Smyrna, where I lived for three 
weeks. I had gone there for the sake of 
the river, and my first impulse was to take 
the road that runs southerly along its bank. 
At the time I thought it the most beautiful 
road I had found in Florida, nor have I seen 
any great cause since to alter that opinion. 
With many pleasant windings (beautiful 
roads are never straight, nor unnecessarily 
wide, which is perhaps the reason why our 
rural authorities devote themselves so madly 
to the work of straightening and widening), 
— with many pleasant windings, I say, 

" The grace of God made manifest in curves," 

it follows the edge of the hammock, having 
the river on one side, and the forest on the 
other. It was afternoon when I first saw it. 
Then it is shaded from the sun, while the 
river and its opposite bank have on them a 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 69 

light more beautiful than can be described 
or imagined ; a light — with reverence for 
the poet of nature be it spoken — a light 
that never was except on sea or land. The 
poet's dream was never equal to it. 

In a flat country stretches of water are 
doubly welcome. They take the place of 
hills, and give the eye what it craves, — dis- 
tance ; which softens angles, conceals details, 
and heightens colors, — in short, trans- 
figures the world with its romancer's touch, 
and blesses us with illusion. So, as I loi- 
tered along the south road, I never tired of 
looking across the river to the long, wooded 
island, and over that to the line of sand-hills 
that marked the eastern rim of the East 
Peninsula, beyond which was the Atlantic. 
The white crests of the hills made the 
sharper points of the horizon line. Else- 
where clumps of nearer pine-trees intervened, 
while here and there a tall palmetto stood, 
or seemed to stand, on the highest and far- 
thest ridge looking seaward. But particu- 
lars mattered little. The blue water, the 
pale, changeable grayish-green of the low 
island woods, the deeper green of the pines, 
the unnamable hues of the sky, the sun- 



70 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

shine that flooded it all, these were beauty 
enough ; — beauty all the more keenly en- 
joyed because for much of the way it was 
seen only by glimpses, through vistas of pal- 
metto and live-oak. Sometimes the road 
came quite out of the woods, as it rounded a 
turn of the hammock. Then I stopped to 
gaze long at the scene. Elsewhere I pushed 
through the hedge at favorable points, and 
sat, or stood, looking up and down the river. 
A favorite seat was the prow of an old row- 
boat, which lay, falling to pieces, high and 
dry upon the sand. It had made its last 
cruise, but I found it still useful. 

The river is shallow. At low tide sand- 
bars and oyster-beds occupy much of its 
breadth ; and even when it looked full, a 
great blue heron would very likely be wad- 
ing in the middle of it. That was a sight 
to which I had grown accustomed in Florida, 
where this bird, familiarly known as " the 
major," is apparently ubiquitous. Too big 
to be easily hidden, it is also, as a general 
thing, too wary to be approached within 
gunshot. I am not sure that I ever came 
within sight of one, no matter how suddenly 
or how far away, that it did not give evi- 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 71 

dence of having seen me first. Long legs, 
long wings, a long bill — and long sight and 
long patience : such is the tall bird's dowry. 
Good and useful qualities, all of them. 
Long may they avail to put off the day of 
their owner's extermination. 

The major is scarcely a bird of which you 
can make a pet in your mind, as you may 
of the chickadee, for instance, or the blue- 
bird, or the hermit thrush. He does not 
lend himself naturally to such imaginary en- 
dearments. But it is pleasant to have him 
on one's daily beat. I should count it one 
compensation for having to live in Florida 
instead of in Massachusetts (but I might 
require a good many others) that I should 
see him a hundred times as often. In walk- 
ing down the river road I seldom saw less 
than half a dozen ; not together (the major, 
like fishermen in general, is of an unsocial 
turn), but here one and there one, — on a 
sand-bar far out in the river, or in some 
shallow bay, or on the submerged edge of 
an oyster-flat. Wherever he was, he always 
looked as if he might be going to do some- 
thing presently ; even now, perhaps, the 
matter was on his mind; but at this mo- 



72 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

ment — well, there are times when a heron's 
strength is to stand still. Certainly he 
seemed in no danger of overeating. A 
cracker told me that the major made an 
excellent dish if killed on the full of the 
moon. I wondered at that qualification, 
but my informant explained himself. The 
bird, he said, feeds mostly at night, and 
fares best with the moon to help him. If 
the reader would dine off roast blue heron, 
therefore, as I hope I never shall, let him 
mind the lunar phases. But think of the 
gastronomic ups and downs of a bird that is 
fat and lean by turns twelve times a year ! 
Possibly my informant overstated the case ; 
but in any event I would trust the major to 
bear himself like a philosopher. If there is 
any one of God's creatures that can wait for 
what he wants, it must be the great blue 
heron. 

I have spoken of his caution. If he was 
patrolling a shallow on one side of an 
oyster-bar, — at the rate, let us say, of two 
steps a minute, — and took it into his head 
(an inappropriate phrase, as conveying an 
idea of something like suddenness) to try 
the water on the other side, he did not 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 73 

spread his wings, as a matter of course, and 
fly over. First he put up his head — an 
operation that makes another bird of him — 
and looked in all directions. How could he 
tell what enemy might be lying in wait ? 
And having alighted on the other side (his 
manner of alighting is one of his prettiest 
characteristics), he did not at once draw in 
his neck till his bill protruded on a level 
with his body, and resume his labors, but 
first he looked once more all about him. It 
was a good habit to do that, anyhow, and 
he meant to run no risks. If " the race 
of birds was created out of innocent, light- 
minded men, whose thoughts were directed 
toward heaven," according to the word of 
Plato, then Ai'dea liei'odias must long ago 
have fallen from grace. I imagine his state 
of mind to be always like that of our pil- 
grim fathers in times of Indian massacres. 
When they went after the cows or to hoe the 
corn, they took their guns with them, and 
turned no corner without a sharp lookout 
against ambush. No doubt such a condi- 
tion of affairs has this advantage, that it 
makes ennui impossible. There is always 
something to live for, if it be only to avoid 
getting killed. 



74 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

After this manner did tlie Hillsborough 
River majors all behave themselves until my 
very last walk beside it. Then I found the 
exception, — the excej^tion that is as good 
as inevitable in the case of any bird, if 
the observation be carried far enough. He 
(or she ; there was no telling which it was) 
stood on the sandy beach, a splendid crea- 
ture in full nuptial garb, two black plumes 
nodding jauntily from its crown, and masses 
of soft elongated feathers draping its back 
and lower neck. Nearer and nearer I ap- 
proached, till I must have been within a 
hundred feet ; but it stood as if on dress 
parade, exulting to be looked at. Let us 
hope it never carried itself thus gayly when 
the wrong man came along. 

Near the major — not keeping him com- 
pany, but feeding in the same shallows 
and along the same oyster-bars — were con- 
stantly to be seen two smaller relatives 
of his, the little blue heron and the Louisi- 
ana. The former is what is called a dichro- 
matic species ; some of the birds are blue, 
and others white. On the Hillsborough, 
it seemed to me that white specimens pre- 
dominated; but possibly that was because 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 75 

they were so much more consjjicuous. Sun- 
light favors the white feather ; no other color 
shows so quickly or so far. If you are on 
the beach and catch sight of a bird far 
out at sea, — a gull or a tern, a gannet or 
a loon, — it is invariably the white parts 
that are seen first. And so the little white 
heron might stand never so closely against 
the grass or the bushes on the further shore 
of the river, and the eye could not miss him. 
If he had been a blue one, art that distance, 
ten to one he would have escaped me. Be- 
sides, I was more on the alert for white ones, 
because I was always hoping to find one of 
them with black legs. In other words, I 
was looking for the little white egret, a bird 
concerning which, thanks to the murderous 
work of plume-hunters, — thanks, also, to 
those good women who pay for having the 
work done, — I must confess that I went 
to Florida and came home again without 
certainly seeing it. 

The heron with which I found myself es- 
pecially taken was the Louisiana ; a bird of 
about the same size as the little blue, but 
with an air of daintiness and lightness that 
is quite its own, and quite indescribable. 



76 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

When it rose upon the wing, indeed, it 
seemed almost too light, almost unsteady, as 
if it lacked ballast, like a butterfly. It was 
the most numerous bird of its tribe along 
the river, I think, and, with one exception, 
the most approachable. That exception was 
the green heron, which frequented the flats 
along the village front, and might well have 
been mistaken for a domesticated bird ; let- 
ting you walk across a plank directly over 
its head while it squatted upon the mud, and 
when disturbed flying into a fig-tree before 
the hotel piazza, just as the dear little ground 
doves were in the habit of doing. To me, 
who had hitherto seen the green heron in 
the wildest of places, this tameness was an 
astonishing sight. It would be hard to say 
which surprised me more, the New Smyrna 
green herons or the St. Augustine sparrow- 
hawks, — which latter treated me very much 
as I am accustomed to being treated by vil- 
lage-bred robins in Massachusetts. 

The Louisiana heron was my favorite, as 
I say, but incomj^arably the handsomest 
member of the family (I speak of such as I 
saw) was the great white egret. In truth, 
the epithet " handsome " seems almost a 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 77 

vulgarism as applied to a creature so superb, 
so utterly and transcendently splendid. I 
saw it — in a way to be sure of it — only 
once. Then, on an island in the Hillsbor- 
ough, two birds stood in the dead tops of 
low shrubby trees, fully exposed in the 
most favorable of lights, their long dorsal 
trains drooping behind them and swaying 
gently in the wind. I had never seen any- 
thing so magnificent. And when I returned, 
two or three hours afterward, from a jaunt 
up the beach to Mosquito Inlet, there they 
still were, as if they had not stirred in all 
that time. The reader should understand 
that this egret is between four and five feet 
in length, and measures nearly five feet from 
wing tip to wing tip, and that its plumage 
throughout is of spotless white. It is pitiful 
to think how constantly a bird of that size 
and color must be in danger of its life. 

Happily, the lawmakers of the State have 
done something of recent years for the pro- 
tection of such defenseless beauties. Hap- 
pily, too, shooting from the river boats is no 
longer permitted, — on the regular lines, 
that is. I myself saw a young gentleman 
stand on the deck of an excursion steamer, 



78 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

with a rifle, and do his worst to kill or maim 
every living thing that came in sight, from 
a spotted sandpiper to a turkey buzzard ! I 
call him a "gentleman;" he was in gentle 
company, and the fact that he chewed gum 
industriously would, I fear, hardly invali- 
date his claim to that title. The narrow 
river wound in and out between low, densely 
wooded banks, and the beauty of the shift- 
ing scene was enough almost to take one's 
breath away ; but the crack of the rifle 
was not the less frequent on that account. 
Perhaps the sportsman was a Southerner, 
to whom river scenery of that enchanting 
kind was an old story. More likely he was 
a Northerner, one of the men who thank 
Heaven they are " not sentimental." 

In my rambles up and down the river 
road I saw few water birds beside the her- 
ons. Two or three solitary cormorants would 
be shooting back and forth at a furious rate, 
or swimming in midstream ; and sometimes 
a few spotted sandpipers and killdeer plov- 
ers were feeding along the shore. Once in 
a great while a single gull or tern made its 
appearance, — just often enough to keep 
me wondering why they were not there 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 79 

oftener, — and one day a water turkey went 
suddenly over my head and dropped into 
the river on the farther side of the island, 
I was glad to see this interesting creature 
for once in salt water ; for the Hillsbor- 
ough, like the Halifax and the Indian rivers, 
is a river in name only, — a river by brevet, 
— being, in fact, a salt-water lagoon or 
sound between the mainland and the eastern 
peninsula. 

Fish-hawks were always in sight, and 
bald eagles were seldom absent altogether. 
Sometimes an eagle stood perched on a dead 
tree on an island. Oftener I heard a 
scream, and looked up to see one sailing far 
overhead, or chasing an osprey. On one 
such occasion, when the hawk seemed to be 
making a losing fight, a third bird suddenly 
intervened, and the eagle, as I thought, was 
driven away. " Good for the brotherhood 
of fish-hawks ! " I exclaimed. But at that 
moment I put my glass on the new-comer ; 
and behold, he was not a hawk, but another 
eagle. Meanwhile the hawk had disap- 
peared with his fish, and I was left to pon- 
der the mystery. 

As for the wood, the edge of the ham- 



80 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

mock, tlirougli which the road passes, there 
were no birds in it. It was one of those 
places (I fancy every bird-gazer must have 
had experience of such) where it is a waste 
of time to seek them. I could walk down 
the road for two miles and back again, and 
then sit in my room at the hotel for fifteen 
minutes, and see more wood birds, and more 
kinds of them, in one small live-oak before 
the window than I had seen in the whole 
four miles ; and that not once and by acci- 
dent, but again and again. In affairs of this 
kind it is useless to contend. The spot looks 
favorable, you say, and nobody can deny it ; 
there must be birds there, plenty of them ; 
your missing them to-day was a matter of 
chance; you will try again. And you try 
again — and again — and yet again. But 
in the end you have to acknowledge that, 
for some reason unknown to you, the birds 
have agreed to give that j^lace the go-by. 

One bird, it is true, I found in this ham- 
mock, and not elsewhere : a single oven-bird, 
which, with one Northern water thrush and 
one Louisiana water thrush, completed my 
set of Florida Seiuri. Besides him I recall 
one hermit thrush, a few cedar-birds, a 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 81 

house wren, chattering at a great rate 
among the " bootjacks " (leaf -stalks) of an 
overturned palmetto-tree, with an occasional 
mocking-bird, cardinal grosbeak, prairie 
warbler, yellow redpoll, myrtle bird, ruby- 
crowned kinglet, plioebe, and flicker. In 
short, there were no birds at all, except now 
and then an accidental straggler of a kind 
that could be found almost anywhere else in 
indefinite numbers. 

And as it was not the presence of birds 
that made the river road attractive, so nei- 
ther was it any unwonted display of blos- 
soms. Beside a similar road along the 
bank of the Halifax, m Daytona, grew mul- 
titudes of violets, and goodly patches of pur- 
ple verbena (garden j^lants gone wild, per- 
haps), and a fine profusion of spiderwort, 
— a pretty flower, the bluest of the blue, 
thrice welcome to me as having been one of 
the treasures of the very first garden of 
which I have any remembrance. "Indigo 
plant," we called it then. Here, however, 
on the way from New Smyrna to Hawks 
Park, I recall no violets, nor any verbena 
or spiderwort. Yellow wood-sorrel (oxalis) 
was here, of course, as it was everywhere. 



82 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 



It dotted the grass in Florida very much as 
five-fingers do in Massachusetts, I sometimes 
thought. And the creeping, round-leaved 
houstonia was here, with a superfluity of a 
weedy blue sage {Salvia lyrata). Here, 
also, as in Daytona, I found a strikingly 
handsome tufted plant, a highly varnished 
evergreen, which I persisted in taking for 
a fern — the sterile fronds — in spite of 
repeated failures to find it described by 
Dr. Chapman under that head, until at last 
an excellent woman came to my help with 
the information that it was " coontie " (^Za- 
mia integrifolia')^ famous as a plant out 
of which the Southern people made bread 
in war time. This confession of botanical 
amateurishness and incompetency will be 
taken, I hope, as rather to my credit than 
otherwise ; but it would be morally worth- 
less if I did not add the story of another 
plant, which, in this same New Smyrna 
hammock, I frequently noticed hanging in 
loose bunches, like blades of flaccid deep 
green grass, from the trunks of cabbage 
palmettos. The tufts were always out of 
reach, and I gave them no particular 
thought ; and it was not until I got home 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 83 

to Massachusetts, and then almost by acci- 
dent, that I learned what they were. They, 
it turned out, were ferns ( Vittaria lineata 
— grass fern), and my discomfiture was 
complete. 

This comparative dearth of birds and flow- 
ers was not in all respects a disadvantage. 
On the contrary, to a naturalist blessed now 
and then with a supernaturalistic mood, it 
made the place, on occasion, a welcome re- 
treat. Thus, one afternoon, as I remember, 
I had been reading Keats, the only book I 
had brought with me, — not counting man- 
uals, of course, which come under another 
head, — and by and by started once more 
for the pine lands by the way of the cotton- 
shed hammock, " to see what I could see." 
But poetry had spoiled me just then for 
anything like scientific research, and as I 
waded through the ankle-deep sand I said 
to myself all at once, " No, no ! What do 
I care for another new bird? I want to 
see the beauty of the world." With that I 
faced about, and, taking a side track, made 
as directly as possible for the river road. 
There I should have a mind at ease, with no 
unfamiliar, tantalizing bird note to set my 



84 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

curiosity on edge, nor any sand through 
which to be picking my steps. 

The river road is paved with oyster-shells. 
If any reader thinks that statement prosaic 
or unimportant, then he has never lived in 
southern Florida. In that part of the world 
all new-comers have to take walking-lessons ; 
unless, indeed, they have already served an 
apprenticeship on Cape Cod, or in some other 
place equally arenarious. My own lesson I 
got at second hand, and on a Sunday. It 
was at New Smyrna, in the village. Two 
women were behind me, on their way home 
from church, and one of them was complain- 
ing of the sand, to which she was not yet 
used. "Yes," said the other, "I found it 
pretty hard walking at first, but I learned 
after a while that the best way is to set the 
heel down hard, as hard as you can ; then 
the sand does n't give under you so much, 
and you get along more comfortably." I 
wonder whether she noticed, just in front 
of her, a man who began forthwith to bury 
his boot heel at every step ? 

In such a country (the soil is said to be 
good for orange-trees, but they do not have 
to walk) roads of powdered shell are veri- 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 85 

table luxuries, and land agents are quite 
right in laying all stress upon tliem as in- 
ducements to possible settlers. If the author 
of the Apocalypse had been raised in Florida, 
we should never have had the streets of the 
New Jerusalem paved with gold. His idea 
of heaven would have been different from 
that ; more personal and home-felt, we may 
be certain. 

The river road, then, as I have said, and 
am glad to say again, was shell-paved. And 
well it might be ; for the hammock, along 
the edge of which it meandered, seemed, in 
some places at least, to be little more than a 
pile of oyster-shells, on which soil had some- 
how been deposited, and over which a forest 
was growing. Florida Indians have left an 
evil memory. I heard a philanthropic visitor 
lamenting that she had talked with many of 
the people about them, and had yet to hear 
a single word said in their favor. Somebody 
might have been good enough to say that, 
with all their faults, they had given to 
eastern Florida a few hills, such as they are, 
and at present are supplying it, indirectly, 
with comfortable highways. How they must 
have feasted, to leave such heaps of shells 



86 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

behind them ! They came to the coast on 
purpose, we may suppose. Well, the red- 
men are gone, but the oyster-beds remain ; 
and if winter refugees continue to pour in 
this direction, as doubtless they will, they 
too will eat a " heap " of oysters (it is easy 
to see how the vulgar Southern use of that 
word may have originated), and in the 
course of time, probably, the shores of the 
Halifax and the Hillsborough will be a fine 
mountainous country ! And then, if this 
ancient, nineteenth-century prediction is re- 
membered, the highest peak of the range 
will perhaps be named in a way which the 
innate modesty of the prophet restrains him 
from specifying with greater particularity. 

Meanwhile it is long to wait, and tourists 
and residents alike must find what comfort 
they can in the lesser hills which, thanks to 
the good appetite of their predecessors, are 
already theirs. For my own part, there is 
one such eminence of which I cherish the 
most grateful recollections. It stands (or 
stood; the road-makers had begun carting 
it away) at a bend in the road just south of 
one of the Turnbull canals. I climbed it 
often (it can hardly be less than fifteen or 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 87 

twenty feet above the level of the sea), and 
spent more than one pleasant hour upon its 
grassy summit. Northward was New Smyrna, 
a village in the woods, and farther away 
towered the lighthouse of Mosquito Inlet. 
Along the eastern sky stretched the long 
line of the peninsula sand-hills, between the 
white crests of which coidd be seen the rude 
cottages of Coronado beach. To the south 
and west was the forest, and in front, at my 
feet, lay the river with its woody islands. 
Many times have I climbed a mountain 
and felt myself abundantly repaid by an off- 
look less beautiful. This was the spot to 
which I turned when I had been reading 
Keats, and wanted to see the beauty of the 
world. Here were a grassy seat, the shadow 
of orange-trees, and a wide prospect. In 
Florida, I found no better place in which a 
man who wished to be both a naturalist and 
a nature-lover, who felt himself heir to a 
double inheritance, 

" The clear eye's moiety and the dear heart's part," 

could for the time sit stiU and be happy. 

The orange-trees yielded other things be- 
side shadow, though perhaps nothing better 



88 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

than that. They were resplendent with 
fruit, and on my earlier visits were also in 
bloom. One did not need to climb the hill 
to learn the fact. For an out-of-door sweet- 
ness it would be hard, I think, to improve 
upon the scent of orange blossoms. As for 
the oranges themselves, they seemed to be 
in little demand, large and handsome as they 
were. Southern people in general, I fancy, 
look upon wild fruit of this kind as not ex- 
actly edible. I remember asking two colored 
men in Tallahassee whether the oranges still 
hanging conspicuously from a tree just over 
the wall (a sight not so very common in 
that part of the State) were sweet or sour. 
I have forgotten just what they said, but I 
remember how they looked. I meant the 
inquiry as a mild bit of humor, but to them 
it was a thousandfold better than that : it 
was wit ineffable. What Shakespeare said 
about the prosperity of a jest was never more 
strikingly exemplified. In New Smyrna, 
with orange groves on every hand, the wild 
fruit went begging with natives and tourists 
alike ; so that I feel a little hesitancy about 
confessing my own relish for it, lest I should 
be accused of affectation. Not that I de- 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 89 

vourecl wild oranges by the dozen, or in 
place of sweet ones ; one sour orange goes 
a good way, as the common saying is ; but I 
ate them, nevertheless, or rather drank them, 
and found them, in a thirsty hour, decidedly 
refreshinof. 

The unusual coldness of the past season 
(Florida winters, from what I heard about 
them, must have fallen of late into a queer 
habit of being regularly exceptional) had 
made it difficult to buy sweet oranges that 
were not dry and " punky" i toward the stem ; 
but the hardier wild fruit had weathered the 
frost, and was so juicy that, as I say, you 
did not so much eat one as drink it. As for 
the taste, it was a wholesome bitter-sour, as 
if a lemon had been flavored with quinine ; 
not quite so sour as a lemon, perhaps, nor 
quite so bitter as Peruvian bark, but, as 
it were, an agreeable compromise between 
the two. When I drank one, I not only 
quenched my thirst, but felt that I had 
taken an infallible prophylactic against the 
malarial fever. Better still, I had surprised 
myself. For one who had felt a lifelong 

1 I have heard this useful word all my life, and now 
am surprised to find it wanting in the dictionaries. 



90 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

distaste, unsocial and almost unmanly, for 
the bitter drinks whicli humanity in general 
esteems so essential to its health and comfort, 
I was develo23ing new and unexpected capa- 
bilities ; than which few things can be more 
encouraging as years increase upon a man's 
head, and the world seems to be closing in 
about him. 

Later in the season, on this same shell 
mound, I might have regaled myself with 
fresh figs. Here, at any rate, was a thrifty- 
looking fig-tree, though its crop, if it bore 
one, would perhaps not have waited my com- 
ing so patiently as the oranges had done. 
Here, too, was a red cedar ; and to me, who, 
in my ignorance, had always thought of 
this tough little evergreen as especially at 
home on my own bleak and stony hillsides, 
it seemed an incongruous trio, — fig-tree, 
orange-tree, and savin. In truth, the cedars 
of Florida were one of my liveliest surprises. 
At first I refused to believe that they were 
red cedars, so strangely exuberant were they, 
so disdainful of the set, cone-shaped, toy-tree 
pattern on which I had been used to seeing 
red cedars built. And when at last a study 
of the flora compelled me to admit their 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 91 

identity/ I turned about and protested that 
I had never seen red cedars before. One, 
in St. Augustine, near San Marco Avenue, 
I had the curiosity to measure. The girth 
of the trunk at the smallest place was six 
feet five inches, and the spread of the 
branches was not less than fifty feet. 

The stroller in this road suffered few dis- 
tractions. The houses, two or three to the 
mile, stood well back in the woods, with 
little or no cleared land about them. Picnic 
establishments they seemed to a Northern 
eye, rather than permanent dwellings. At 
one point in the hammock, a rude camp was 
occupied by a group of rough-looking men 
and several small children, who seemed to 
be getting on as best they could — none too 
well, to judge from appearances — without 

^ I speak as if I had accepted my own study of the 
manual as conclusive. I did for the time being", but 
while writing this paragraph I bethought myself that 
I might be in error, after all. I referred the question, 
therefore, to a friend, a botanist of authority. ' ' No won- 
der the red cedars of Florida puzzled you," he replied. 
"No one would suppose at first that they were of the 
same species as our New England savins. The habit is 
entirely different ; but botanists have found no characters 
by which to separate them, and you are safe in consider- 
ing them as Juniperus Virginiana.'^ 



92 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

feminine ministrations. What they were 
there for I never made out. They fished, 
I think, but whether by way of amusement 
or as a serious occupation I did not learn. 
Perhaps, like the Indians of old, they had 
come to the river for the oyster season. 
They might have done worse. The}^ never 
paid the slightest attention to me, nor once 
gave me any decent excuse for engaging 
them in talk. The best thing I remember 
about them was a tableau caught in passing. 
A " norther " had descended upon us unex- 
pectedly (Florida is not a whit behind the 
rest of the world in sudden changes of tem- 
perature), and while hastening homeward, 
toward nightfall, hugging myself to keep 
warm, I saw, in the woods, this group of 
campers disposed about a lively blaze. 

Let us be thankful, say I, that memory 
is so little the servant of the will. Chance 
impressions of this kind, unforeseen, invol- 
untary, and inexplicable, make one of the 
chief delights of traveling, or rather of hav- 
ing traveled. In the present case, indeed, 
the permanence of the impression is perhaps 
not altogether beyond the reach of a plau- 
sible conjecture. We have not always lived 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 93 

in houses ; and if we love the sight of a fire 
out-of-doors, — a camp-fire, that is to say, 
— as we all do, so that the burning of a 
brush-heap in a neighbor's yard will draw 
us to the window, the feeling is but part of 
an ancestral inheritance. We have come 
by it honestly, as the phrase is. And so I 
need not scruple to set down another remi- 
niscence of the same kind, — an early morn- 
ing street scene, of no importance in itself, 
in the village of New Smyrna. It may 
have been on the morning next after the 
"norther" just mentioned. I cannot say. 
We had two or three such touches of winter 
in early March ; none of them at all distress- 
ing, be it understood, to persons in ordinary 
health. One night water froze, — " as thick 
as a silver dollar," — and orange growers 
were alarmed for the next season's crop, the 
trees being just ready to blossom. Some 
men kept fires burning in their orchards 
overnight ; a pretty spectacle, I should think, 
especially where the fruit was still ungath- 
ered. On one of these frosty mornings, 
then, I saw a solitary horseman, not " wend- 
ing his way," but warming his hands over a 
fire that he had built for that purpose in 



94 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

the village street. One miglit live and die 
in a New England village without seeing 
such a sight. A Yankee would have be- 
taken himself to the corner grocery. But 
here, though that " adjunct of civilization '' 
was directly across the way, most likely it 
had never had a stove in it. The sun would 
give warmth enough in an hour, — by nine 
o'clock one would probably be glad of a 
sunshade ; but the man was chilly after his 
ride ; it was still a bit early to go about the 
business that had brought him into town : 
what more natural than to hitch his horse, 
get together a few sticks, and kindle a blaze ? 
What an insane idea it would have seemed 
to him that a passing stranger might re- 
member him and his fire three months 
afterward, and think them worth talking 
about in print ! But then, as was long ago 
said, it is the fate of some men to have 
greatness thrust upon them. 

This main street of the village, by the 
way, with its hotels and shops, was no other 
than my river road itself, in its more civil- 
ized estate, as I now remember with a sense 
of surprise. In my mind the two had never 
any connection. It was in this thorough- 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 95 

fare that one saw now and tlien a group 
of cavaliers strolling about under broad- 
brimmed hats, with big spurs at their heels, 
accosting passers-by with hearty familiarity, 
first names and hand-shakes, while their 
horses stood hitched to the branches of road- 
side trees, — a typical Southern picture. 
Here, on a Sunday afternoon, were two 
young fellows who had brought to town a 
mother coon and three young ones, hoping 
to find a purchaser. The guests at the 
hotels manifested no eagerness for such 
pets, but the colored bell-boys and waiters 
gathered about, and after a little good-hu- 
mored dickering bought the entire lot, box 
and all, for a dollar and a haK ; first having 
pulled the little ones out between the slats 
— not without some risk to both parties — 
to look at them and pass them round. The 
venders walked oif with grins of ill-concealed 
triumph. The Fates had been kind to them, 
and they had three silver half-dollars in their 
pockets. I heard one of them say something 
about giving part of the money to a third 
man who had told them where the nest was ; 
but his companion would listen to no such 
folly. "He wouldn't come with us," he 



96 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

said, "and we won't tell him a damned 
thing.'* I fear there was nothing distinc- 
tively Southern about tJiat, 

Here, too, in the heart of the town, was 
a magnificent cluster of live-oaks, worth 
coming to Florida to see ; far-spreading, full 
of ferns and air plants, and heavy with 
hanging moss. Day after day I went 
out to admire them. Under them was a 
neglected orange grove, and in one of the 
orange-trees, amid the glossy foliage, ap- 
peared my first summer tanager. It was 
a royal setting, and the splendid vermilion- 
red bird was worthy of it. Among the 
oaks I walked in the evening, listening to 
the strange low chant of the chuck-will's- 
widow, — a name which the owner himself 
pronounces with a rest after the first syl- 
lable. Once, for two or three days, the 
trees were amazingly full of blue yellow- 
backed warblers. Numbers of them, a 
dozen at least, could be heard singing at 
once directly over one's head, running up 
the scale not one after another, but literally 
in unison. Here the tufted titmouse, the 
very soul of monotony, piped and piped 
and piped, as if his diapason stop were 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 97 

pulled out and stuck, and could not be 
pushed in again. He is an odd genius. 
With plenty of notes, he wearies you al- 
most to distraction, harping on one string 
for half an hour together. He is the one 
Southern bird that I should perhaps be 
sorry to see common in Massachusetts ; but 
that " perhaps " is a large word. Many 
yellow-throated warblers, silent as yet, were 
commonly in the live-oaks, and innumerable 
myrtle birds, also silent, with prairie war- 
blers, black-and-white creepers, solitary vir- 
eos, an occasional chickadee, and many more. 
It was a birdy spot ; and just across the 
way, on the shrubby island, were red-winged 
blackbirds, who piqued my curiosity by 
adding to the familiar conharee a final syl- 
lable, — the Florida termination, I called 
it, — which made me wonder whether, as 
has been the case with so many other Flor- 
ida birds, they might not turn out to be a 
distinct race, worthy of a name (Agelaius 
phoeniceus something -or-other^ ^ as well as of 
a local habitation. I suggest the question 
to those whose business it is to be learned in 
such matters.^ 

1 My suggestion, I now discover, — since this paper was 



98 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

The tall grass about the borders of the 
island was alive with clapper rails. Before 
I rose in the morning I heard them crying 
in full chorus ; and now and then during 
the day something would happen, and all 
at once they would break out with one 
sharp volley, and then instantly all would 
be silent again. Theirs is an apt name, — 
Rallus crepitans. Once I watched two of 
them in the act of crepitating, and ever 
after that, when the sudden uproar burst 
forth, I seemed to see the reeds full of 
birds, each with his bill pointing skyward, 
bearing his part in the salvo. So far as 
I could perceive, they had nothing to fear 
from human enemies. They ran about the 
mud on the edge of the grass, especially 
in the morning, looking like half-grown 
pullets. Their specialty was crab-fishing, 
at which they were highly expert, plunging 
into the water up to the depth of their 

first printed, — was some years too late. Mr. Ridgway, 
in his Manual of North American Birds (1887), had already 
described a subspecies of Florida redwings under the 
name of Agelaius phoeniceus hryanti. Whether my New 
Smyrna birds should come under that title cannot be told, 
of course, in the absence of specimens ; but on the strength 
of the song I venture to think it highly probable. 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 99 

legs, and handling and swallowing pretty 
large specimens with surprising dexterity. 
I was greatly pleased with them, as well 
as with their local name, " everybody's 
chickens." 

Once I feared we had heard the last of 
them. On a day following a sudden fall 
of the mercury, a gale from the north set 
in at noon, with thunder and lightning, 
hail, and torrents of rain. The river was 
quickly lashed into foam, and the gale 
drove the ocean into it tlirough the inlet, 
till the shrubbery of the rails' island barely 
showed above the breakers. The street was 
deep under water, and fears were enter- 
tained for the new bridge and the road to 
the beach. All night the gale continued, 
and all the next day till late in the after- 
noon ; and when the river should have been 
at low tide, the island was still flooded. 
Gravitation was overmatched for the time 
being. And where were the rails, I asked 
myself. They could swim, no doubt, when 
put to it, but it seemed impossible that 
they could survive so fierce an inundation. 
Well, the wind ceased, the tide went out 
at last; and behold, the rails were in full 



100 ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 

cry, not a voice missing! How they had 
managed it was beyond my ken. 

Another island, farther out than that of 
the rails (but the rails, like the long-billed 
marsh wrens, appeared to be present in 
force all up and down the river, in suitable 
places), was occupied nightly as a crow- 
roost. Judged by the morning clamor, 
which, like that of the rails, I heard from 
my bed, its population must have been enor- 
mous. One evening I happened to come 
up the street just in time to see the hinder 
part of the procession — some hundreds of 
birds — flying across the river. They came 
from the direction of the pine lands in 
larger and smaller squads, and with but a 
moderate amount of noise moved straight 
to their destination. All but one of them 
so moved, that is to say. The performance 
of that one exception was a mystery. He 
rose high in the air, over the river, and 
remained soaring all by himself, acting 
sometimes as if he were catching insects, 
till the flight had passed, even to the last 
scattering detachments. What could be 
the meaning of his eccentric behavior ? 
Some momentary caprice had taken him, 



ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH. 101 

perhaps. Or was he, as I could not help 
asking, some duly appointed officer of the 
day, — grand marshal, if you please, — 
with a commission to see all hands in be- 
fore retiring himself? He waited, at any 
rate, till the final stragglers had passed; 
then he came down out of the air and fol- 
lowed them. I meant to watch the ingath- 
ering a second time, to see whether this fea- 
ture of it would be repeated, but I was 
never there at the right moment. One can- 
not do everything. 

Now, alas, Florida seems very far oif. I 
am never likely to walk again under those 
New Smyrna live-oaks, nor to see again all 
that beauty of the Hillsborough. And yet, 
in a truer and better sense of the word, I 
do see it, and shall. What a heavenly light 
falls at this moment on the river and the 
island woods ! Perhaps we must come back 
to Wordsworth, after all, — 

" The light that never was, on sea or land." 



A MORNING AT THE OLD SUGAR 
MILL.i 

On the third or fourth clay of my sojourn 
at the Live Oak Inn, the lady of the house, 
noticing my peripatetic habits, I suppose, 
asked whether I had been to the old sugar 
mill. The ruin is mentioned in the guide- 
books as one of the historic features of the 

1 I have called the ruin here spoken of a " sugar mill " 
for no better reason than because that is the name com- 
monly applied to it by the residents of the town. When 
this sketch was written, I had never heard of a theory 
since broached in some of our Northern newspapers, — I 
know not by whom, — that the edifice in question was 
built as a chapel, perhaps by Columbus himself ! I should 
be glad to believe it, and can only add my hope that he 
will be shown to have built also the so-called sugar mill 
a few miles north of New Smyrna, in the Dunlawton ham- 
mock behind Port Orange. In that, to be sure, there is 
still much old machinery, but perhaps its presence would 
prove no insuperable objection to a theory so pleasing. 
In matters of this kind, much depends upon subjective 
considerations ; in one sense, at least, " all things are pos- 
sible to him that believeth." For my own part, I profess 
no opinion. I am neither an archaeologist nor an ecclesi- 
astic, and speak simply as a chance observer. 



THE OLD SUGAR MILL. 103 

ancient settlement of New Smyrna, but I 
liad forgotten the fact, and was thankful to 
receive a description of the place, as well as 
of the road thither, — a rather blind road, 
my informant said, with no houses at which 
to inquire the way. 

Two or three mornings afterward, I set 
out in the direction indicated. If the route 
proved to be half as vague as my good lady's 
account of it had sounded, I should probably 
never find the mill ; but the walk would be 
pleasant, and that, after all, was the prin- 
cipal consideration, especially to a man who 
just then cared more, or thought he did^for 
a new bird or a new song than for an indefi- 
nite number of eighteenth-century relics. 

For the first half-mile the road follows 
one of the old TurnbuU canals dug through 
the coquina stone which underlies the soil 
hereabout ; then, after crossing the railway, 
it strikes to the left through a piece of truly 
magnificent wood, known as the cotton-shed 
hammock, because, during the war, cotton 
was stored here in readiness for the block- 
ade runners of Mosquito Inlet. Better than 
anything I had yet seen, this wood answered 
to my idea of a semi-tropical forest: live- 



104 THE OLD SUGAR MILL. 

oaks, magnolias, palmettos, sweet gmns, 
maples, and hickories, with here and there a 
long-leaved pine overtopping all the rest. 
The palmettos, most distinctively Southern 
of them all, had been badly used by their 
hardier neighbors ; they looked stunted, and 
almost without exception had been forced 
out of their normal perpendicular attitude. 
The live-oaks, on the other hand, were noble 
specimens ; lofty and wide-spreading, elm- 
like in habit, it seemed to me, though not 
without the sturdiness which belongs as by 
right to all oaks, and seldom or never to the 
American elm. 

What gave its peculiar tropical character 
to the wood, however, was not so much the 
trees as the profusion of plants that covered 
them and depended from them : air-plants 
(^TiUandsia),\sirge and small, — like pine- 
apples, with which they claim a family re- 
lationship, — the exuberant hanging moss, 
itself another air-plant, ferns, and vines. 
The ferns, a species of polypody (" resur- 
rection ferns," I heard them called), com- 
pletely covered the upper surface of many 
of the larger branches, while the huge vines 
twisted about the trunks, or, quite as often, 



THE OLD SUGAR MILL. 105 

dropped straight from the treetops to the 
ground. 

In the very heart of this dense, dark for- 
est (a forest primeval, I should have said, 
but I was assured that the ground had been 
under cultivation so recently that, to a prac- 
ticed eye, the cotton-rows were still visible) 
stood a grove of wild orange-trees, the hand- 
some fruit glowing like lamps amid the deep 
green foliage. There was little other bright- 
ness. Here and there in the undergrowth 
were yellow jessamine vines, but already 
— March 11 — they were past flowering. 
Almost or quite the only blossom just now 
in sight was the faithful round-leaved hous- 
tonia, growing in small flat patches in the 
sand on the edge of the road, with budding 
partridge-berry — a Yankee in Florida — 
to keep it company. Warblers and titmice 
twittered in the leafy treetops, and butter- 
flies of several kinds, notably one gorgeous 
creature in yellow and black, like a larger 
and more resplendent Turnus, went flutter- 
ing through the underwoods. I could have 
believed myself in the heart of a limitless 
forest ; but Florida hammocks, so far as I 
have seen, are seldom of great extent, and 



106 THE OLD SUGAR MILL. 

the road presently crossed another railway 
track, and then, in a few rods more, came 
out into the sunny pine-woods, as one might 
emerge from a cathedral into the open day. 
Two men were approaching in a wagon (ex- 
cept on Sunday, I am not certain that I ever 
met a foot passenger in the flat-woods), and 
I improved the opportunity to make sure 
of my course. " Go about fifty yards," said 
one of them, " and turn to the right ; then 
about fifty yards more, and turn to the left. 
That road will take you to the mill." Here 
was a man who had traveled in the pine 
lands, — where, of all places, it is easy to 
get lost and hard to find yourself, — and 
not only appreciated the value of explicit 
instructions, but, being a Southerner, had 
leisure enough and politeness enough to give 
them. I thanked him, and sauntered on. 
The day was before me, and the place was 
lively with birds. Pine-wood sparrows, pine 
warblers, and red-winged blackbirds were 
in song ; two red-shouldered hawks were 
screaming, a flicker was shouting, a red- 
bellied woodpecker cried kur-r-r-r, brown- 
headed nuthatches were gossii3ing in the dis- 
tance, and suddenly I heard, what I never 



THE OLD SUGAR MILL. 107 

thought to hear in a pinery, the croak of a 
green heron. I turned quickly and saw him. 
It was indeed he. What a friend is igno- 
rance, mother of all those happy surprises 
which brighten existence as they pass, like 
the butterflies of the wood. The heron was 
at home, and I was the stranger. For there 
was water near, as there is everywhere in 
Florida ; and subsequently, in this very 
place, I met not only the green heron, but 
three of his relatives, — the great blue, the 
little blue, and the dainty Louisiana, more 
poetically known (and worthy to wear the 
name) as the " Lady of the Waters." 

On this first occasion, however, the green 
heron was speedily forgotten ; for just then 
I heard another note, unlike anything I had 
ever heard before, — as if a great Northern 
shrike had been struck with preternatural 
hoarseness, and, like so many other victims 
of the Northern winter, had betaken himself 
to a sunnier clime. I looked up. In the 
leafy top of a pine sat a boat-tailed grackle, 
splendidly iridescent, engaged in a musical 
performance which afterward became almost 
too familiar to me, but which now, as a 
novelty, was as interesting as it was gro- 



108 THE OLD SUGAR MILL. 

tesque. This, as well as I can describe it, 
is what the bird was doing. He opened his 
bill, — set it, as it were, wide apart, — and 
holding it thus, emitted four or five rather 
long and very loud grating, shrikish notes ; 
then instantly shook his wings with an ex- 
traordinary flapping noise, and followed that 
with several highly curious and startling 
cries, the concluding one of which sometimes 
suggested the cackle of a robin. All this 
he repeated again and again with the utmost 
fervor. He could not have been more en- 
thusiastic if he had been making the sweet- 
est music in the world. And I confess that 
I thought he had reason to be proud of 
his work. The introduction of wing-made 
sounds in the middle of a vocal performance 
was of itself a stroke of something like 
genius. It put me in mind of the firing of 
cannons as an accompaniment to the Anvil 
Chorus. Why should a creature of such 
gifts be named for his bodily dimensions, or 
the shape of his tail ? Why not Quiscalus 
gihnorius^ Gilmore's grackle ? 

That the sounds ivere wing-made I had 
no thought of questioning. I had seen the 
thing done, — seen it and heard it ; and 



THE OLD SUGAR MILL. 109 

what shall a man trust, if not his own eyes 
and ears, especially when each confirms the 
other? Two days afterward, nevertheless, 
I began to doubt. I heard a grackle " sing " 
in the manner just described, wing-beats and 
all, while flying from one tree to another; 
and later still, in a country where boat-tailed 
grackles were an every-day sight near the 
heart of the village, I more than once saw 
them produce the sounds in question with- 
out any perceptible movement of the wings, 
and furthermore, their mandibles could be 
seen moving in time with the beats. So 
hard is it to be sure of a thing, even when 
you see it and hear it. 

" Oh yes," some sharp-witted reader will 
say, " you saw the wings flapping, — beat- 
ing time, — and so you imagined that the 
sounds were like wing-beats." But for once 
the sharp-witted reader is in the wrong. 
The resemblance is not imaginary. Mr. F. 
M. Chapman, in A List of Birds Observed 
at Gainesville, Florida,^ says of the boat- 
tailed grackle ( Quiscalus major) : " A sin- 
gular note of this species greatly resembles 
the flapping of wings, as of a coot tripping 
1 The Auk, vol. v. p. 273. 



110 THE OLD SUGAR MILL. 

over the water ; this sound was very familiar 
to me, but so excellent is the imitation that 
for a long time I attributed it to one of the 
numerous coots which abound in most places 
favored by Q. major, ^'' 

If the sounds are not produced by the 
wings, the question returns, of course, why 
the wings are shaken just at the right in- 
stant. To that I must respond with the 
time -honored formula, ''Not prepared." 
The reader may believe, if he will, that 
the bird is aware of the imitative quality 
of the notes, and amuses itself by heighten- 
ing the delusion of the looker-on. My own 
more commonplace conjecture is that the 
sounds are produced by snappings and grat- 
ings of the big mandibles (" He is gritting 
his teeth," said a shrewd unornithological 
Yankee, whose opinion I had solicited), and 
that the wing movements may be nothing 
but involuntary accompaniments of this al- 
most convulsive action of the beak. But 
perhaps the sounds are wing-made, after all. 

On the day of which I am writing, at 
any rate, I was troubled by no misgivings. 
I had seen something new, and was only 
desirous to see more of it. Who does not 



THE OLD SUGAR MILL. Ill 

love an original character? For at least 
half an hour the old mill was forgotten, 
while I chased the grackle about, as he flew 
hither and thither, sometimes with a logger- 
head shrike in furious pursuit. Once I had 
gone a few rods into the palmetto scrub, 
partly to be nearer the bird, but still more 
to enjoy the shadow of a pine, and was 
standing under the tree, motionless, when a 
man came along the road in a gig. " Sur- 
veying?" he asked, reining in his horse. 
"No, sir; I am looking at a bird in the 
tree yonder." I wished him to go on, and 
thought it best to gratify his curiosity at 
once. He was silent a moment ; then he 
said, " Looking at the old sugar house from 
there?" That was too preposterous, and 
I answered with more voice, and perhaps 
with a touch of impatience, " No, no ; I 
am trying to see a bird in that pine-tree." 
He was silent again. Then he gathered up 
the reins. " I 'm so deaf I can't hear you," 
he said, and drove on. "Good-by," I re- 
marked, in a needless undertone ; " you 're 
a good man, I 've no doubt, but deaf people 
should n't be inquisitive at long range." 
The advice was sound enough, in itself 



112 THE OLD SUGAB MILL. 

considered; properly understood, it might 
be held to contain, or at least to suggest, 
one of the profoundest, and at the same 
time one of the most practical, truths of all 
devout philosophy ; but the testiness of its 
tone was little to my credit. He was a 
good man, — and the village doctor, — and 
more than once afterward put me under 
obligation. One of his best appreciated 
favors was unintended and indirect. I was 
driving with him through the hammock, 
and we passed a bit of swamj^. " There 
are some pretty flowers," he exclaimed ; " I 
think I must get them.'' At the word he 
jumped out of the gig, bade me do the same, 
hitched his horse, a half -broken stallion, to 
a sapling, and plunged into the thicket. I 
strolled elsewhere ; and by and by he came 
back, a bunch of common blue iris in one 
hand, and his shoes and stockings in the 
other. " They are very pretty," he ex- 
plained (he spoke of the flowers), " and it 
is early for them." After that I had no 
doubt of his goodness, and in case of need 
would certainly have called him rather than 
his younger rival at the opposite end of the 
village. 



THE OLD SUGAR MILL. 113 

When I tired of chasing the grackle, or 
the shrike had driven him away (I do not 
remember now how the matter ended), I 
started again toward the old sugar mill. 
Presently a lone cabin came into sight. 
The grass-grown road led straight to it, and 
stopped at the gate. Two women and a 
brood of children stood in the door, and in an- 
swer to my inquiry one of the women (the 
children had already scampered out of sight) 
invited me to enter the yard. " Go round 
the house," she said, "and you will find a 
road that runs right down to the mill." 

The mill, as it stands, is not much to 
look at : some fragments of wall built of 
coquina stone, with two or three arched win- 
dows and an arched door, the whole sur- 
rounded by a modern plantation of orange- 
trees, now almost as much a ruin as the mill 
itself. But the mill was built more than a 
hundred years ago, and serves well enough 
the principal use of abandoned and decay- 
ing things, — to touch the imagination. 
For myself, I am bound to say, it was a 
precious two hours that I passed beside it, 
seated on a crumbling stone in the shade of 
a dying orange-tree. 



114 THE OLD SUGAR MILL. 

Behind me a redbird was whistling (car- 
dinal grosbeak, I have been accustomed to 
call him, but I like the Southern name bet- 
ter, in spite of its ambiguity), now in eager, 
rapid tones, now slowly and with a dying 
fall. Now his voice fell almost to a whis- 
per, now it rang out again ; but always it 
was sweet and golden, and always the bird 
was out of sight in the shrubbery. The 
orange-trees were in bloom ; the air was 
full of their fragrance, full also of the mur- 
mur of bees. All at once a deeper note 
struck in, and I turned to look. A hum- 
ming-bird was hovering amid the white 
blossoms and glossy leaves. 1 saw his 
flaming throat, and the next instant he was 
gone, like a flash of light, — the first hum- 
mer of the year. I was far from home, and 
expectant of new things. That, I dare say, 
was the reason why I took the sound at first 
for the boom of a bumble-bee ; some strange 
Moridian bee, with a deeper and more me- 
lodious bass than any Northern insect is 
master of. 

It is good to be here, I say to myself, and 
we need no tabernacle. All things are in 
harmony. A crow in the distance says 



THE OLD SUGAR MILL. 115 

caw, caw in a meditative voice, as if he, too, 
were thinking of clays past ; and not even 
the scream of a hen-hawk, off in the pine- 
woods, breaks the spell that is upon us. A 
quail whistles, — a true Yankee Bob White, 
to judge him by his voice, — and the white- 
eyed chewink (he is 7iot a Yankee) whistles 
and sings by turns. The bluebird's warble 
and the pine warbler's trill could never be 
disturbing to the quietest mood. Only one 
voice seems out of tune : the white-eyed 
vireo, even to-day, cannot forget his saucy 
accent. But he soon falls silent. Perhaps, 
after all, he feels himself an intruder. 

The morning is cloudless and warm, till 
suddenly, as if a door had been opened east- 
ward, the sea breeze strikes me. Hence- 
forth the temperature is perfect as I sit in 
the shadow. I think neither of heat nor of 
cold. I catch a glimpse of a beautiful leaf- 
green lizard on the gray trunk of an orange- 
tree, but it is gone (I wonder where) almost 
before I can say I saw it. Presently a 
brown one, with light-colored stripes and a 
bluish tail, is seen traveling over the crum- 
bling wall, running into crannies and out 
again. Now it stops to look at me with its 



116 THE OLD SUGAR MILL. 

jewel of an eye. And there, on the rustic 
arbor, is a third one, matching the un- 
painted wood in hue. Its throat is white, 
but when it is inflated, as happens every 
few seconds, it turns to the loveliest rose 
color. This inflated membrane should be 
a vocal sac, I think, but I hear no sound. 
Perhaps the chameleon's voice is too fine for 
dull human sense. 

On two sides of me, beyond the orange- 
trees, is a thicket of small oaks and cab- 
bage palmettos, — hammock, I suppose it 
is called. In all other directions are the 
pine-woods, with their undergrowth of saw 
palmetto. The cardinal sings from the 
hammock, and so does the Carolina wren. 
The chewinks, the blackbirds (a grackle just 
now flies over, and a fish-hawk, also), with 
the bluebirds and the pine warblers, are in 
the pinery. From the same place comes 
the song of a Maryland yellow - throat. 
There, too, the hen-hawks are screaming. 

At my feet are blue violets and white 
houstonia. Vines, thinly covered with fresh 
leaves, straggle over the walls, — Virginia 
creeper, poison ivy, grapevine, and at least 
one other, the name of which I do not know. 



THE OLD SUGAR MILL. 117 

A clump of tall blackberry vines is full of 
white blossoms, " bramble roses faint and 
pale," and in one corner is a tuft of scarlet 
blooms, — sage, perhaps, or something akin 
to it. For the moment I feel no curiosity. 
But withal the place is unkempt, as be- 
comes a ruin. " Winter's ragged hand " 
has been rather heavy upon it. Withered 
palmetto leaves and leaf-stalks litter the 
ground, and of course, being in Florida, 
there is no lack of orange-peel lying about. 
Ever since I entered the State a new Scrip- 
ture text has been running in my head : In 
the place where the orange - peel f alleth, 
there shall it lie. 

The mill, as I said, is now the centre of 
an orange grove. There must be hundreds 
of trees. All of them are smaU, but the 
greater part are already dead, and the rest 
are dying. Those nearest the walls are 
fullest of leaves, as if the walls somehow 
gave them protection. The forest is creep- 
ing into the inclosure. Here and there the 
graceful palm-like tassel of a young long- 
leaved pine rises above the tall winter-killed 
grass. It is not the worst thing about the 
world that it tends to run wild. 



118 THE OLD SUGAR MILL. 

Now the quail sings again, this time in 
two notes, and now the hummer is again in 
the orange-tree. And all the while the red- 
bird whistles in the shrubbery. He feels 
the beauty of the day. If I were a bird, I 
would sing with him. From far away comes 
the chant of a pine-wood sparrow. I can 
just hear it. 

This is a place for dreams and quietness. 
Nothing else seems worth the having. Let 
us feel no more the fever of life. Surely 
they are the wise who seek Nirvana ; who 
insist not upon themselves, but wait absorp- 
tion — reabsorption — into the infinite. 
The dead have the better part. I think of 
the stirring, adventurous man who built 
these walls and dug these canals. His life 
was full of action, full of journeyings and 
fightings. Now he is at peace, and his 
works do follow him — into the land of for- 
getfulness. Blessed are the dead. Blessed, 
too, are the bees, the birds, the butterflies, 
and the lizards. Next to the dead, perhaps, 
they are happy. And I also am happy, for 
I too am under the spell. To me also the 
sun and the air are sweet, and I too, for to- 
day at least, am careless of the world and 
all its doings. 



THE OLD SUGAB MILL. 119 

So I sat dreaming, when suddenly there 
was a stir in the grass at my feet. A snake 
was coming straight toward me. Only the 
evening before a cracker had filled my ears 
with stories of "rattlers " and "moccasins." 
He seemed to have seen them everywhere, 
and to have killed them as one kills mosqui- 
toes. I looked a second time at the moving 
thing in the grass. It was clothed in inno- 
cent black ; but, being a son of Adam, I 
rose with involuntary politeness to let it 
pass. An instant more, and it slipped into 
the masonry at my side, and I sat down 
again. It had been out taking the sun, and 
had come back to its hole in the wall. How 
like the story of my own day, — of my 
whole winter vacation ! Nay, if we choose 
to view it so, how like the story of human 
life itseK ! 

As I started homeward, leaving the mill 
and the cabin behind me, some cattle were 
feeding in the grassy road. At sight of my 
umbrella (there are few places where a 
sunshade is more welcome than in a Flor- 
ida pine-wood) they scampered away into 
the scrub. Poor, wild-eyed, hungry-looking 
things ! I thought of Pharaoh's lean kine. 



120 THE OLD SUGAR MILL. 

They were like tlie country itself, I was 
ready to say. But perhaps I misjudged 
both, seeing both, as I did, in the winter 
season. With the mercury at 80°, or there- 
about, it is hard for the Northern tourist 
to remember that he is looking at a winter 
landscape. He compares a Florida winter 
with a New England summer, and can 
hardly find words to tell you how barren 
and poverty-stricken the country looks. 

After this I went more than once to the 
sugar mill. Morning and afternoon I vis- 
ited it, but somehow I could never renew 
the joy of my first visit. Moods are not 
to be had for the asking, nor earned by a 
walk. The place was still interesting, the 
birds were there, the sunshine was pleasant, 
and the sea breeze fanned me. The orange 
blossoms were still sweet, and the bees still 
hummed about them ; but it was another 
day, or I was another man. In memory, 
none the less, all my visits blend in one, 
and the ruined mill in the dying orchard re- 
mains one of the bright spots in that strange 
Southern world which, almost from the mo- 
ment I left it behind me, began to fade into 
indistinctness, like the landscape of a dream. 



ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

The city of Sanford is a beautiful and 
interesting place, I hope, to those who live 
in it. To the Florida tourist it is important 
as lying at the head of steamboat navigation 
on the St. John's River, which here expands 
into a lake — Lake Monroe — some five 
miles in width, with Sanford on one side, 
and Enterprise on the other ; or, as a wag- 
gish traveler once expressed it, with Enter- 
prise on the north, and Sanford and enter- 
prise on the south. 

Walking naturalists and lovers of things 
natural have their own point of view, indi- 
vidual, unconventional, whimsical, if you 
please, — very different, at all events, from 
that of clearer-witted and more serious- 
minded men ; and the inhabitants of San- 
ford will doubtless take it as a compliment, 
and be amused rather than annoyed, when I 
confess that I found their city a discourage- 
ment, a widespread desolation of houses and 
shops. If there is a pleasant country road 



122 ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

leading out of it in any direction, I was 
unlucky enough to miss it. My melancholy 
condition was hit off before my eyes in a 
parable, as it were, by a crowd of young 
fellows, black and white, whom I found one 
afternoon in a sand-lot just outside the city, 
engaged in what was intended for a game 
of baseball. They were doing their best, — 
certainly they made noise enough ; but cir- 
cumstances were against them. When the 
ball came to the ground, from no matter 
what height or with what impetus, it fell 
dead in the sand ; if it had been made of 
solid rubber, it could not have rebounded. 
'' Base-running " was little better than base- 
walking. " SKding " was safe, but, by the 
same token, impossible. Worse yet, at 
every " foul strike " or " wild throw " the 
ball was lost, and the barefooted fielders 
had to pick their way painfully about in the 
outlying saw-palmetto scrub till they found 
it. I had never seen our " national game " 
played under conditions so untoward. None 
but true patriots would have the heart to try 
it, I thought, and I meditated writing to 
Washington, where the quadrennial purifica- 
tion of the civil service was just then in prog- 



ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 123 

ress, — under a new broom, — to secure, if 
possible, a few bits of recognition (" plums " 
is the technical term, I believe) for men so 
deserving. The first baseman certainly, 
who had oftenest to wade into the scrub, 
should have received a consulate, at the very 
least. Yet they were a merry crew, those 
national gamesters. Their patriotism was of 
the noblest type, — the unconscious. They 
had no thought of being heroes, nor dreamed 
of bounties or pensions. They quarreled 
with the umpire, of course, but not with 
Fate ; and I hope I profited by their ex- 
ample. My errand in Sanford was to see 
something of the river in its narrower and 
better part ; and having done that, I did not 
regret what otherwise might have seemed a 
profitless week. 

First, however, I walked about the city. 
Here, as already at St. Augustine, and after- 
ward at Tallahassee, I found the mocking- 
birds in free song. They are birds of the 
town. And the same is true of the logger- 
head shrikes, a pair of which had built a 
nest in a small water-oak at the edge of the 
sidewalk, on a street corner, just beyond the 
reach of passers-by. In the roadside trees 



124 ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

— all freshly planted, like the city — were 
myrtle warblers, prairie warblers, and blue 
yellowbacks, the two latter in song. Once, 
after a shower, I watched a myrtle bird 
bathing on a branch among the wet leaves. 
The street gutters were running with sulphur 
water, but he had waited for rain. I com- 
mended his taste, being myself one of those to 
whom water and brimstone is a combination 
as malodorous as it seems unscriptural. 
Noisy boat-tailed grackles, or " jackdaws," 
were plentiful about the lakeside, mon- 
strously long in the tail, and almost as 
large as the fish crows, which were often 
there with them. Over the broad lake 
swept purple martins and white-breasted 
swallows, and nearer the shore fed peace- 
fully a few pied-billed grebes, or dabchicks, 
birds that I had seen only two or three 
times before, and at which I looked more 
than once before I made out what they 
were. They had every appearance of pass- 
ing a winter of content. At the tops of 
three or four stakes, which stood above the 
water at wide intervals, — and at long dis- 
tances from the shore, — sat commonly as 
many cormorants, here, as everywhere, with 



ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 125 

plenty of idle time upon their liands. On 
the other side of the city were orange groves, 
large, well kept, thrifty looking ; the fruit 
still on the trees (March 20, or thereabouts), 
or lying in heaps underneath, ready for the 
boxes. One man's house, I remember, was 
surrounded by a fence overrun with Chero- 
kee rosebushes, a full quarter of a mile of 
white blossoms. 

My best botanical stroll was along one of 
the railroads (Sanford is a " railway cen- 
tre," so called), through a dreary sand 
waste. Here I picked a goodly number of 
novelties, including what looked like a 
beautiful pink chicory, only the plant itself 
was much prettier (^Lygodesmia) ; a very 
curious sensitive-leaved plant QScJiranhia)^ 
densely beset throughout with curved 
prickles, and bearing globes of tiny pink- 
purple flowers ; a calopogon, quite as pretty 
as our Northern jpuldiQlliLS ; a clematis 
{Baldwinii)^ which looked more like a 
bluebell than a clematis till I commenced 
pulling it to pieces ; and a great profusion 
of one of the smaller papaws, or custard- 
apples, a low shrub, just then full of large, 
odd - shaped, creamy - white, heavy - scented 



126 ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

blossoms. I was carrying a sprig of it in 
my hand when I met a negro. " What is 
this ? " I asked. " I dunno, sir." " Is n't 
it papaw?" "No, sir, that ain't papaw ; " 
and then, as if he had just remembered 
something, he added, " That 's dog banana." 
Oftener than anywhere else I resorted to 
the shore of the lake, — to the one small 
part of it, that is to say, which was at the 
same time easily reached and comparatively 
unfrequented. There — going one day far- 
ther than usual — I found myself in the 
borderland of a cypress swamp. On one 
side was the lake, but between me and it 
were cypress-trees ; and on the other side 
was the swamp itself, a dense wood growing 
in stagnant black water covered here and 
there with duckweed or some similar growth : 
a frightful place it seemed, the very abode 
of snakes and everything evil. Stories of 
slaves hiding in cypress swamps came into 
my mind. It must have been cruel treat- 
ment that drove them to it ! Buzzards flew 
about my head, and looked at me. " He 
has come here to die," I imagined them say- 
ing among themselves. " No one comes 
here for anything else. Wait a little, and 



ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 127 

we will pick his bones." They perched 
near by, and, not to lose time, employed the 
interval in drying their wings, for the night 
had been showery. Once in a while one of 
them shifted his perch with an ominous 
rustle. They were waiting for me, and 
were becoming impatient. " He is long 
about it," one said to another; and I did 
not wonder. The place seemed one from 
which none who entered it could ever go 
out; and there was no going farther in 
without plunging into that horrible mire. 
I stood still, and looked and listened. Some 
strange noise, " bird or devil," came from 
the depths of the wood. A flock of grackles 
settled in a tall cypress, and for a time 
made the place loud. How still it was after 
they were gone ! I could hardly withdraw 
my gaze from the green water full of slimy 
black roots and branches, any one of which 
might suddenly lift its head and open its 
deadly white mouth ! Once a fish-hawk fell 
to screaming farther down the lake. I had 
seen him the day before, standing on the 
rim of his huge nest in the top of a tree, 
and uttering the same cries. All about 
me gigantic cypresses, every one swollen 



128 ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

enormously at the base, rose straight and 
branchless into the air. Dead trees, one 
might have said, — light-colored, appar- 
ently with no bark to cover them ; but if I 
glanced up, I saw that each bore at the top 
a scanty head of branches just now putting 
forth fresh green leaves, while long funereal 
streamers of dark Spanish moss hung thickly 
from every bough. 

I am not sure how long I could have 
stayed in such a spot, if I had not been able 
to look now and then through the branches 
of the under-woods out upon the sunny lake. 
Swallows innumerable were playing over 
the water, many of them soaring so high as 
to be all but invisible. Wise and happy 
birds, lovers of sunlight and air. They 
would never be found in a cypress swamp. 
Along the shore, in a weedy shallow, the 
peaceful dabchicks were feeding. Far off 
on a post toward the middle of the lake 
stood a cormorant. But I could not keep 
my eyes long at once in that direction. The 
dismal swamp had me under its spell, and 
meanwhile the patient buzzards looked at 
me. " It is almost time," they said ; " the 
fever will do its work," — and I began to 



ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 129 

believe it. It was too bad to come away; 
the stupid town offered no attraction ; but it 
seemed perilous to remain. Perhaps I could 
not come away. I would try it and see. It 
was amazing that I could; and no sooner 
was I out in the sunshine than I wished I 
had stayed where I was; for having once 
left the place, I was never likely to find it 
again. The way was plain enough, to be 
sure, and my feet would no doubt serve 
me. But the feet cannot do the mind's part, 
and it is a sad fact, one of the saddest in 
life, that sensations cannot be repeated. 

With the fascination of the swamp still 
upon me, I heard somewhere in the distance 
a musical voice, and soon came in sight of a 
garden where a middle-aged negro was hoe- 
ing, — hoeing and singing: a wild, minor, 
endless kind of tune; a hymn, as seemed 
likely from a word caught here and there ; 
a true piece of natural melody, as artless as 
any bird's. I walked slowly to get more 
of it, and the happy-sad singer minded me 
not, but kept on with his hoe and his song. 
Potatoes or corn, whatever his crop may have 
been, — I did not notice, or, if I did, I have 
forgotten, — it should have prospered under 
his hand. 



130 ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

Farther along, in the highway, — a sandy 
track, with wastes of scrub on either side, — 
a boy of eight or nine, armed with a double- 
barreled gun, was lingering about a patch 
of dwarf oaks and palmettos. " Have n't 
got that rabbit yet, eh?" said I. (I had 
passed him there on my way out, and he 
had told me what he was after.) 

" No, sir," he answered. 

" I don't believe there 's any rabbit there." 

" Yes, there is, sir ; I saw one a little 
while ago, but he got away before I could 
get pretty near." 

" Good ! " I thought. " Here is a gram- 
marian. Not one boy in ten in this country 
but would have said ' I seen.' " A scholar 
like this was worth talking with. " Are 
there many rabbits here ? " I asked. 

"Yes, sir, there 's a good deal." 

And so, by easy mental stages, I was 
clear of the swamp and back in the town, 
— saved from the horrible, and delivered 
to the commonplace and the dreary. 

My best days in Sanford were two that I 
spent on the river above the lake. A youth- 
ful boatman, expert alike with the oar and 
the gun, served me faithfidly and well, 



ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 131 

impossible as it was for him to enter fully 
into the spirit of a man who wanted to look 
at birds, but not to kill them. I think he 
had never before seen a customer of that 
breed. First he rowed me up the " creek," 
under promise to show me alligators, moc- 
casins, and no lack of birds, including the 
especially desired purple gallinule. The 
snakes were somehow missing (a loss not 
irreparable), and so were the purple galli- 
nules ; for them, the boy thought, it was 
still rather early in the season, although he 
had killed one a few days before, and for 
proof had brought me a wing. But as we 
were skirting along the shore I suddenly 
called " Hist ! " An alligator lay on the 
bank just before us. The boy turned his 
head, and instantly was all excitement. It 
was a big fellow, he said, — one of three 
big ones that inhabited the creek. He would 
get him this time. "Are you sure?" I 
asked. " Oh yes, I '11 blow the toj) of his 
head ofP." He was loaded for gallinules, 
and I, being no sportsman, and never hav- 
ing seen an alligator before, was some 
shades less confident. But it was his game, 
and I left him to his way. He pulled the 



132 ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

boat noiselessly against the bank in the 
shelter of tall reeds, put down the oars, with 
which he could almost have touched the 
alligator, and took uj) his gun. At that 
moment the creature got wind of us, and 
slipped incontinently into the water, not a 
little to my relief. One live alligator is 
worth a dozen dead ones, to my thinking. 
He showed his back above the surface of the 
stream for a moment shortly afterward, and 
then disappeared for good. 

Ornithologically, the creek was a disap- 
pointment. We pushed into one bay after 
another, among the dense "bonnets," — 
huge leaves of the common yellow pond lily, 
— but found nothing that I had not seen 
before. Here and there a Florida gallinule 
put up its head among the leaves, or took 
flight as we pressed too closely upon it ; but 
I saw them to no advantage, and with a 
single exception they were dumb. One bird, 
as it dashed into the rushes, uttered two 
or three cries that sounded familiar. The 
Florida gallinule is in general pretty silent, 
I think ; but he has a noisy season ; then he 
is indeed noisy enough. A swamp contain- 
ing a single pair might be supposed to be 



ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 133 

populous with barn-yard fowls, the fellow 
keeps up such a clatter : now loud and terror- 
stricken, " like a hen whose head is just go- 
ing to be cut off," as a friend once expressed 
it ; then soft and full of content, as if the 
aforesaid hen had laid an egg ten minutes 
before, and were still felicitating herself 
upon the achievement. It was vexatious 
that here, in the very home of Florida galli- 
nules, I should see and hear less of them 
than I had more than once done in Massa- 
chusetts, where they are esteemed a pretty 
choice rarity, and where, in spite of what 
I suppose must be called exceptional good 
luck, my acquaintance with them had been 
limited to perhaps half a dozen birds. But 
in affairs of this kind a direct chase is 
seldom the best rewarded. At one point 
the boatman pulled up to a thicket of small 
willows, bidding me be prepared to see birds 
in enormous numbers ; but we found only a 
small company of night herons — evidently 
breeding there — and a green heron. The 
latter my boy shot before I knew what he 
was doing. He took my reproof in good 
part, protesting that he had had only a 
glimpse of the bird, and had taken it for a 



134 ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

possible gallinule. In the course of the trip 
we saw, besides the species already named, 
great blue and little blue herons, pied-billed 
grebes, coots, cormorants, a flock of small 
sandpipers (on the wing), buzzards, vul- 
tures, fish-hawks, and innumerable red- 
winged blackbirds. 

Three days afterward we went up the 
river. At the upper end of the lake were 
many white -billed coots (^Fidica ameri- 
ccma) ; so many that we did our best to 
count them as they rose, flock after flock, 
dragging their feet over the water behind 
them with a multitudinous splashing noise. 
There were a thousand, at least. They had 
an air of being not so very shy, but they 
were nobody's fools. " See there ! " my boy 
would exclaim, as a hundred or two of them 
dashed past the boat ; "see how they keep 
just out of range ! " 

We were hardly on the river itself before 
he fell into a state of something like frenzy 
at the sight of an otter swimming before us, 
showing its head, and then diving. He 
made after it in hot haste, and fired I know 
not how many times, but all for nothing. 
He had killed several before now, he said, 



ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 135 

but liad never been obliged to chase one in 
tbis fashion. Perhaps there was a Jonah in 
the ship ; for though I symj)athized with the 
boy, I sympathized also, and still more 
warmly, with the otter. It acted as if life 
were dear to it, and for aught I knew it had 
as good a right to live as either the boy or I. 
No such qualms disturbed me a few min- 
utes later, when, as the boat was grazing the 
reeds, I espied just ahead a snake lying in 
wait among them. I gave the alarm, and 
the boy looked round. " Yes," he said, " a 
big one, a moccasin, — a cotton-mouth ; but 
I '11 fix him." He pulled a stroke or two 
nearer, then lifted his oar and brought it 
down splash ; but the reeds broke the blow, 
and the moccasin slipped into the water, 
apparently unharmed. That was a case for 
powder and shot. Florida people have a 
poor opinion of a man who meets a venom- 
ous snake, no matter where, without doing 
his best to kill it. How strong the feeling 
is my boatman gave me proof within ten min- 
utes after his failure with the cotton-mouth. 
He had puUed out into the middle of the 
river, when I noticed a beautiful snake, short 
and rather stout, lying coiled on the water. 



136 ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

Whether it was an optical illusion I cannot 
say, but it seemed to me that the creature 
lay entirely above the surface, — as if it had 
been an inflated skin rather than a live 
snake. We passed close by it, but it made 
no offer to move, only darting out its tongue 
as the boat slipped past. I spoke to the 
boy, who at once ceased rowing. 

"I think I must go back and kill that 
fellow," he said. 

" Why so? " I asked, with surprise, for I 
had looked upon it simply as a curiosity. 

" Oh, I don't like to see it live. It 's the 
poisonousest snake there is." 

As he spoke he turned the boat : but the 
snake saved him further trouble, for just 
then it uncoiled and swam directly toward 
us, as if it meant to come aboard. " Oh, 
you 're coming this way, are you ? " said the 
boy sarcastically. " Well, come on ! " The 
snake came on, and when it got well within 
range he took up his fishing-rod (with hooks 
at the end for drawing game out of the 
reeds and bonnets), and the next moment 
the snake lay dead upon the water. He 
slipped the end of the pole under it and 
slung it ashore. " There ! how do you like 



ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 137 

that ? " said lie, and he headed the boat 
upstream again. It was a " copper-bellied 
moccasin," he declared, whatever that may 
be, and was worse than a rattlesnake. 

On the river, as in the creek, we were 
continually exploring bays and inlets, each 
with its promising patch of bonnets. Nearly 
every such place contained at least one 
Florida gallinule ; but where were the " pur- 
ples," about which we kept talking, — the 
"royal purples," concerning whose beauty 
my boy was so eloquent ? 

" They are not common yet," he would 
say. *' By and by they will be as thick 
as Floridas are now." 

" But don't they stay here all winter ? " 

" No, sir ; not the purples." 

" Are you certain about that ? " 

"Oh yes, sir. I have hunted this river 
too much. They couldn't be here in the 
winter without my knowing it." 

I wondered whether he could be right, or 
partly right, notwithstanding the book state- 
ments to the contrary. I notice that Mr. 
Chapman, writing of his experiences with 
this bird at Gainesville, says, " None were 
seen until May 25, when, in a part of the 



138 ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

lake before unvisited, — a mass of floating 
islands and ' bonnets,' — I found them not 
uncommon." The boy's assertions may be 
worth recording, at any rate. 

In one place he fired suddenly, and as he 
put down the gun he exclaimed, " There ! 
I '11 bet I 've shot a bird you never saw 
before. It had a bill as long as that," 
with one finger laid crosswise upon another. 
He hauled the prize into the boat, and sure 
enough, it was a novelty, — a king rail, new 
to both of us. We had gone a little farther, 
and were passing a prairie, on which were 
pools of water where the boy said he had 
often seen large flocks of white ibises feeding 
(there were none there now, alas, though we 
crept up with all cautiousness to peep over 
the bank), when all at once I descried some 
sharp-winged, strange-looking bird over our 
heads. It showed sidewise at the moment, 
but an instant later it turned, and I saw its 
long forked tail, and almost in the same 
breath its white head. A fork-tailed kite ! 
and purple gallinules were for the time for- 
gotten. It was performing the most grace- 
ful evolutions, swooping half-way to the 
earth from a great height, and then sweep- 



ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 139 

ing upward again. Another minute, and I 
saw a second bird, farther away. I watched 
the nearer one till it faded from sight, soar- 
ing and swooping by turns, — its long, scis- 
sors-shaped tail all the while fully spread, — 
but never coming down, as its habit is said 
to be, to skim over the surface of the water. 
There is nothing more beautiful on wings, 
I believe : a large hawk, with a swallow's 
grace of form, color, and motion. I saw it 
once more (four birds) over the St. Mark's 
River, and counted the sight one of the chief 
rewards of my Southern winter. 

At noon we rested and ate our luncheon 
in the shade of three or four tall palmetto- 
trees standing by themselves on a broad 
prairie, a place brightened by beds of blue 
iris and stretches of golden senecio, — home- 
like as well as pretty, both of them. Then 
we set out again. The day was intensely 
hot (March 24), and my oarsman was more 
than half sick with a sudden cold. I begged 
him to take things easily, but he soon ex- 
perienced an almost miraculous renewal of 
his forces. In one of the first of our after- 
dinner bonnet patches, he seized his gun, 
fired, and began to shout, " A purple ! a pur- 



140 ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

pie ! " He drew the bird in, as proud as 
a prince. " There, sir ! " he said ; " did n't 
I tell you it was handsome? It has every 
color there is." And indeed it was hand- 
some, worthy to be called the " Sultana ; '' 
with the most exquisite iridescent bluish- 
purple plumage, the legs yellow, or greenish- 
yellow (a point by which it may be distin- 
guished from the Florida gallinule, as the 
bird flies from you), the bill red tipped with 
pale green, and the shield (on the forehead, 
like a continuation of the upper mandible) 
light blue, of a peculiar shade, " just as if it 
had been painted." From that moment the 
boy was a new creature. Again and again 
he spoke of his altered feelings. He could 
pull the boat now anywhere I wanted to go. 
He was perfectly fresh, he declared, al- 
though I thought he had already done a 
pretty good day's work under that scorching- 
sun. I had not imagined how deeply his 
heart was set upon showing me the bird 
I was after. It made me twice as glad to 
see it, dead though it was. 

Within an hour, on our way homeward, 
we came upon another. It sprang out of 
the lily pads, and sped toward the tall grass 



ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 141 

of the shore. "Look! look! a purple!" 
the boy cried. " See his yeUow legs ! " 
Instinctively he raised his gun, but I said 
No. It would be inexcusable to shoot a 
second one ; and besides, we were at that 
moment approaching a bird about which I 
felt a stronger curiosity, — a snake-bird, or 
water-turkey, sitting in a willow shrub at 
the further end of the bay. " Pull me as 
near it as it will let us come," I said. " I 
want to see as much of it as possible." At 
every rod or two I stopped the boat and put 
up my glasses, till we were within perhaps 
sixty feet of the bird. Then it took wing, 
but instead of flying away went sweeping 
about us. On getting round to the willows 
again it made as if it would alight, uttering 
at the same time some faint ejaculations, 
like " ah ! ah ! ah ! " but it kept on for a 
second sweep of the circle. Then it j)erched 
in its old place, but faced us a little less 
directly, so that I could see the beautiful 
silver tracery of its wings, like the finest 
of embroidery, as I thought. After we had 
eyed it for some minutes we suddenly per- 
ceived a second bird, ten feet or so from it, 
in full sight. Where it came from, or how 



142 ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

it got there, I have no idea. Our first bird 
kept his bill parted, as if in distress ; a 
peculiar action, which probably had some 
connection with the other bird's presence, 
although the two paid no attention to each 
other so far as we could make out. When 
we had watched them as long as we pleased, 
I told the boy to pull the boat forward till 
they rose. We got within thirty feet, I 
think. At that point they took flight, and, 
side by side, went soaring into the air, now 
flapping their wings, now scaling in unison. 
It was beautiful to see. As they sat in the 
willows and gazed about, their long necks 
were sometimes twisted like corkscrews, — 
or so they looked, at all events. 

The water-turkey is one of the very odd- 
est of birds. I am not likely to forget the 
impression made upon me by the first one 
I saw. It was standing on a prostrate log, 
but rose, as I drew near, and, to my surprise, 
mounted to a prodigious elevation, where 
for a long time it remained, sailing round 
and round with all the grace of a hen-hawk 
or an eagle. Its neck and head were tenu- 
ous almost beyond belief, — like a knitting- 
needle, I kept repeating to myself. Its tail. 



ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 143 

too, shaped like a narrow wedge, was uncon- 
scionably long; and as tlie bird showed 
against the sky, I could think of nothing 
but an animated sign of addition. A bet- 
ter man — the Emperor Constantine, shall 
we say? — might have seen in it a nobler 
symbol. 

While we were loitering down the river, 
later in the afternoon, an eagle made its ap- 
pearance far overhead, the first one of the 
day. The boy, for some reason, refused to 
believe that it was an eagle. Nothing but a 
sight of its white head and tail through the 
glass could convince him. (The perfectly 
square set of the wings as the bird sails is a 
pretty strong mark, at no matter what dis- 
tance.) Presently an osprey, not far from 
us, with a fish in his claws, set up a violent 
screaming. " It is because he has caught a 
fish," said the boy ; " he is calling his mate." 
" No," said I, " it is because the eagle is 
after him. Wait a bit." In fact, the eagle 
was already in pursuit, and the hawk, as he 
always does, had begun struggling upward 
with all his might. That is the fish-hawk's 
way of appealing to Heaven against his op. 
pressor. He was safe for that time. Three 



144 ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

negroes, sliad-fishers, were just beyond us 
(we had seen them there in the morning, 
wading about the river setting their nets), 
and at the sight of them and of us, I have 
no doubt, the eagle turned away. The boy 
was not peculiar in his notion about the os- 
prey's scream. Some one else had told me 
that the bird always screamed after catch- 
ing a fish. But I knew better, having seen 
him catch a hundred, more or less, without 
uttering a sound. The safe rule, in such 
cases, is to listen to all you hear, and be- 
lieve it — after you have verified it for 
yourself. 

It was while we were discussing this ques- 
tion, I think, that the boy opened his heart 
to me about my methods of study. He had 
looked through the glass now and then, and 
of course had been astonished at its power. 
" Why," he said finally, " I never had any 
idea it could be so much fun just to look at 
birds in the way you do ! " I liked the turn 
of his phrase. It seemed to say, " Yes, I be- 
gin to see through it. We are in the same 
boat. This that you call study is only an- 
other kind of sport." I could have shaken 
hands with him but that he had the oars. 



ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 145 

Who does not love to be flattered by an 
ingenuous boy ? 

All in all, the day had been one to be re- 
membered. In addition to the birds already 
named — three of them new to me — we had 
seen great blue herons, little blue herons, 
Louisiana herons, night herons, cormorants, 
pied-billed grebes, kingfishers, red-winged 
blackbirds, boat-tailed grackles, redpoll and 
myrtle warblers, savanna sparrows, tree 
swallows, purple martins, a few meadow 
larks, and the ubiquitous turkey buzzard. 
The boat-tails abounded along the river 
banks, and, with their tameness and their 
ridiculous outcries, kept us amused whenever 
there was nothing else to absorb our atten- 
tion. The prairie lands through which the 
river meanders proved to be surprisingly 
dry and passable (the water being unusually 
low, the boy said), with many cattle pas- 
tured upon them. Here we found the sa- 
vanna sparrows ; here, too, the meadow larks 
were singing. 

It was a hard pull across the rough lake 
against the wind (a dangerous sheet of 
water for flat-bottomed rowboats, I was told 
afterward), but the boy was equal to it, pro- 



146 ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

testing that lie did n't feel tired a bit, now 
we liad got the " purples ; " and if he did not 
catch the fever from drinking some quarts 
of river water (a big bottle of coffee having 
proved to be only a drop in the bucket), 
against my urgent remonstrances and his 
own judgment, I am sure he looks back 
upon the labor as on the whole well spent. 
He was going North in the spring, he told 
me. May joy be with him wherever he is ! 

The next morning I took the steamer 
down the river to Blue Spring, a distance of 
some thirty miles, on my way back to New 
Smyrna, to a place where there were accessi- 
ble woods, a beach, and, not least, a daily sea 
breeze. The river in that part of its course 
is comfortably narrow, — a great advantage, 
— winding through cypress swamps, ham- 
mock woods, stretches of prairie, and in one 
place a pine barren ; an interesting and 
in many ways beautiful country, but so 
unwholesome looking as to lose much of 
its attractiveness. Three or four large al- 
ligators lay sunning themselves in the most 
obliging manner upon the banks, here one 
and there one, to the vociferovis delight of 
the passengers, who ran from one side of the 



ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 147 

deck to the other, as the captain shouted 
and pointed. One, he told us, was thirteen 
feet long, the largest in the river. Each 
appeared to have its own well-worn sunning- 
spot, and all, I believe, kept their places, as 
if the passing of the big steamer — almost 
too big for the river at some of the sharper 
turns — had come to seem a commonplace 
event. Herons in the usual variety were 
present, with ospreys, an eagle, kingfishers, 
ground doves, Carolina doves, blackbirds 
(red-wings and boat-tails), tree swallows, 
purple martins, and a single wild turkey, the 
first one I had ever seen. It was near the 
bank of the river, on a bushy prairie, fully 
exposed, and crouched as the steamer passed. 
For a Massachusetts ornithologist the mere 
sight of such a bird was enough to make a 
pretty good Thanksgiving Day. Blue yel- 
low-backed warblers were singing here and 
there, and I retain a particular remembrance 
of one bluebird that warbled to us from the 
pine-woods. The captain told me, some- 
what to my surprise, that he had seen two 
flocks of paroquets during the winter (they 
had been very abundant along the river 
within his time, he said), but for me there 



148 ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

was no such fortune. One bird, soaring in 
company with a buzzard at a most extraordi- 
nary height straight over the river, gTeatly 
excited my curiosity. The captain declared 
that it must be a great blue heron ; but he 
had never seen one thus engaged, nor, so far 
as I can learn, has any one else ever done so. 
Its upper parts seemed to be mostly white, 
and I can only surmise that it may have 
been a sandhill crane, a bird which is said 
to have such a habit. 

As I left the boat I had a little experience 
of the seamy side of Southern travel ; no- 
thing to be angry about, perhaps, but annoy- 
ing, nevertheless, on a hot day. I surren- 
dered my check to the purser of the boat, 
and the deck hands put my trunk upon the 
landing at Blue Spring. But there was no 
one there to receive it, and the station was 
locked. We had missed the noon train, with 
which we were advertised to connect, by so 
many hours that I had ceased to think about 
it. Finally, a negro, one of several who 
were fishing thereabouts, advised me to go 
" up to the house, " which he pointed out be- 
hind some woods, and see the agent. This 
I did, and the agent, in turn, advised me to 



ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 149 

walk up the track to the " Junction, " and 
be sure to tell the conductor, when the even- 
ing train arrived, as it probably would do 
some hours later, that I had a trunk at the 
landing. Otherwise the train woiUd not run 
down to the river, and my baggage would lie 
there till Monday. He would go down pres- 
ently and put it under cover. Happily, he 
fulfilled his promise, for it was already be- 
ginning to thunder, and soon it rained in 
torrents, with a cold wind that made the hot 
weather all at once a thing of the past. 

It was a long wait in the dreary little 
station ; or rather it would have been, had 
not the tedium of it been relieved by the 
presence of a newly married couple, whose 
honeymoon was just then at the full. Their 
delight in each other was exuberant, effer- 
vescent, beatific, — what shall I say ? — quite 
beyond veiling or restraint. At first I be- 
stowed upon them sidewise and cornerwise 
glances only, hiding bashfully behind my 
spectacles, as it were, and pretending to see 
nothing ; but I soon perceived that I was to 
them of no more consequence than a fly on 
the wall. If they saw me, which sometimes 
seemed doubtful, — for love is blind, — they 



150 ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S. 

evidently thonglit me too sensible, or too old, 
to mind a little billing and cooing. And 
they were right in their opinion. What was 
I in Florida for, if not for the study of nat- 
ural history? And truly, I have seldom 
seen, even among birds, a pair less sophisti- 
cated, less cabined and confined by that dis- 
astrous knowledge of good and evil which is 
commonly understood to have resulted from 
the eating of forbidden fruit, and which 
among prudish people goes by the name of 
modesty. It was refreshing. Charles 
Lamb himself would have enjoyed it, and, I 
should hope, wovdd have added some quali- 
fying footnotes to a certain unamiable essay 
of his concerning the behavior of married 
people. 



ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 

One of my first inquiries at Tallahassee 
was for the easiest way to the woods. The 
city is built on a hill, with other hills about 
it. These are mostly under cultivation, and 
such woods as lay within sight seemed to 
be pretty far off ; and with the mercury at 
ninety in the shade, long tramps were almost 
out of the question. " Take the St. Augus- 
tine road," said the man to whom I had 
spoken ; and he pointed out its beginning 
nearly opposite the state capitol. After 
breakfast I followed his advice, with results 
so pleasing that I found myself turning 
that corner again and again as long as I 
remained in Tallahassee. 

The road goes abruptly downhill to the 
railway track, first between deep red gulches, 
and then between rows of negro cabins, each 
with its garden of rosebushes, now (early 
April) in full bloom. The deep sides of 
the gulches were draped with pendent Ian- 
tana branches full of purple flowers, or, 



152 ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 

more beautiful still, with a profusion of 
fragrant white honeysuckle. On the road- 
side, between the wheel-track and the gulch, 
grew brilliant Mexican poppies, with Ye- 
nus's looking-glass, yellow oxalis, and beds 
of blackberry vines. The woods of which 
my informant had spoken lay a little beyond 
the railway, on the right hand of the road, 
just as it began another ascent. I entered 
them at once, and after a semicircular tm^n 
through the pleasant paths, amid live-oaks, 
water-oaks, red oaks, chestnut oaks, mag- 
nolias, beeches, hickories, hornbeams, sweet 
gums, sweet bays, and long-leaved and 
short-leaved pines, came out into the road 
again a quarter of a mile farther up 
the hill. They were the fairest of woods 
to stroll in, it seemed to me, with paths 
enough, and not too many, and good 
enough, but not too good; that is to say, 
they were footpaths, not roads, though 
afterwards, on a Sunday afternoon, I met 
two young fellows riding through them on 
bicycles. The wood was delightful, also, 
after my two months in eastern Florida, for 
lying on a slope, and for having an under- 
growth of loose shrubbery instead of a 



ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 153 

jungle of scrub oak and saw palmetto. Blue 
jays and crested flycatchers were doing- 
their best to outscream one another, — with 
the odds in favor of the flycatchers, — and 
a few smaller birds were singing, especially 
two or three smnmer tanagers, as many 
yellow-throated warblers, and a ruby-crowned 
kinglet. In one part of the wood, near 
what I took to be an old city reservoir, I 
came upon a single white-throated sparrow 
and a humming-bird, — the latter a strangely 
uncommon sight in Tallahassee, where, of 
all the places I have ever seen, it ought to 
find itself in clover. Here, too, were a pair 
of Carolina wrens, just now in search of 
a building-site, and conducting themselves 
exactly in the manner of bluebirds intent 
on such business ; peeping into every hole 
that ofPered itself, and then, after the brief- 
est interchange of opinion, — mifavorable 
on the female's part, if we may guess,— 
concluding to look a little farther. 

As I struck the road again, a man came 
along on horseback, and we fell into conver- 
sation about the country. " A lovely comi- 
try," he called it, and I agreed with him. 
He inquired where I was from, and 1 men- 



154 ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE BOAT). 

tioned that I liad lately been in southern 
Florida, and found this region a strong 
contrast. " Yes," he returned ; and, point- 
ing to the grass, he remarked upon the 
richness of the soil. " This yere land would 
fertilize that," he said, speaking of southern 
Florida. " I should n't wonder," said I. I 
meant to be understood as concurring in his 
opinion, but such a qualified, Yankeefied 
assent seemed to him no assent at all. " Oh, 
it will, it will ! " he responded, as if the 
point were one about which I must on no 
account be left unconvinced. He told me 
that the fine house at which I had looked, a 
little distance back, through a long vista of 
trees, was the residence of Captain H., who 
owned all the land along the road for a 
good distance. I inquired how far the road 
was pretty, like this. " For forty miles," he 
said. That was farther than I was ready to 
walk, and coming soon to the top of the hill, 
or, more exactly, of the jjlateau, I stopped 
in the shade of a china-tree, and looked at 
the pleasing prospect. Behind me was a 
plantation of young pear-trees, and before 
me, among the hills northward, lay broad, 
cultivated slopes, dotted here and there with 



ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 155 

cabins and tall, solitary trees. On the 
nearer slope, perhaps a sixteenth of a mile 
away, a negro was ploughing, with a single 
ox harnessed in some primitive manner, 
— with pieces of wood, for the most part, as 
well as I could make out through an operar 
glass. The soil offered the least possible 
hindrance, and both he and the ox seemed 
to be having a literal " walk-over." Beyond 
him — a full half-mile away, perhaps — an- 
other man was ploughing with a mule ; and 
in another direction a third was doing like- 
wise, with a woman following in his wake. 
A colored boy of seventeen — I guessed his 
age at twenty-three — came up the road in a 
cart, and I stopped him to inquire about the 
crops and other matters. The land in front 
of me was planted with cotton, he said ; and 
the men ploughing in the distance were get- 
ting ready to plant the same. They hired 
the land and the cabins of Captain H., pay- 
ing him so much cotton (not so much an 
acre, but so much a mule, if I understood 
him rightly) by way of rent. We talked a 
long time about one thing and another. He 
had been south as far as the Indian River 
country, but was glad to be back again in 



156 ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE BO AD. 

Tallaliassee, where he was born. I asked 
him about the road, how far it went. " They 
tell me it goes smack to St. Augustine," 
he replied ; " I ain't tried it." It was an 
unlikely story, it seemed to me, but I was 
assured afterward that he was right ; that 
the road actually runs across the country 
from Tallahassee to St. Augustine, a dis- 
tance of about two hundred miles. With 
company of my own choosing, and in cooler 
weather, I thought I should like to walk its 
whole length.^ My young man was in no 
haste. With the reins (made of rope, after 
a fashion much followed in Florida) lying 
on the forward axle of his cart, he seemed to 
have put himself entirely at my service. 
He had to the full that peculiar urbanity 
which I began after a while to look upon as 
characteristic of Tallahassee negroes, — a 
gentleness of speech, and a kindly, deferen- 
tial air, neither forward nor servile, such as 

1 But let no enthusiast set out to walk from one city to 
the other on the strength of what is here written. After 
this sketch was first printed — in The Atlantic Monthly 
— a gentleman who ought to know whereof he speaks sent 
me word that my informants were all of them wrong — 
that the road does not run to St. Augustine. For myself, 
I assert nothing. As my colored hoy said, " I ain't tried it." 



ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE BO AD. 157 

sits well on any man, whatever the color of 
his skin. 

In that respect he was like another boy of 
about his own age, who lived in the cabin 
directly before us, but whom I did not see 
till I had been several times over the road. 
Then he happened to be at work near the 
edge of the field, and I beckoned him to me. 
He, too, was serious and manly in his bear- 
ing, and showed no disposition to go back to 
his hoe till I broke off the interview, — as if 
it were a point of good manners with him to 
await my pleasure. Yes, the plantation was 
a good one and easily cultivated, he said, in 
response to some remark of my own. There 
were five in the family, and they all worked. 
" We are all big enough to eat," he added, 
quite simply. He had never been North, 
but had lately declined the offer of a gen- 
tleman who wished to take him there, — 
him and " another fellow." He once went 
to Jacksonville, but could n't stay. " You 
can get along without your father pretty 
well, but it 's another thing to do without 
your mother." He never meant to leave 
home again as long as his mother lived; 
which was likely to be for some years, I 



158 ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 

thought, if she were still able to do her part 
in the cotton-field. As a general thing, the 
colored tenants of the cabins made out 
pretty well, he believed, unless something 
happened to the crops. As for the old ser- 
vants of the H. family, they did n't have to 
work, — they were provided for ; Captain 
H.'s father " left it so in his testimonial." 
I spoke of the purple martins which were 
flying back and forth over the field with 
many cheerful noises, and of the calabashes 
that hung from a tall pole in one corner of 
the cabin yard, for their accommodation. 
On my way South, I told him, I had noticed 
these dangling long-necked squashes every- 
where, and had wondered what they were 
for. I had found out since that they were 
the colored man's martin-boxes, and was 
glad to see the people so fond of the birds. 
" Yes," he said, " there 's no danger of 
hawks carrying off the chickens as long as 
the martins are round." 

Twice afterward, as I went up the road, I 
found him ploughing between the cotton 
rows ; but he was too far away to be ac- 
costed without shouting, and I did not feel 
justified in interrupting him at his work. 



ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 159 

Back and forth he went through the long 
furrow after the patient ox, the hens and 
chickens following. No doubt they thought 
the work was all for their benefit. Farther 
away, a man and two women were hoeing. 
The family deserved to prosper, I said to 
myself, as I lay under a big magnolia-tree 
(just beginning to open its large white 
flowers) and idly enjoyed the scene. And 
it was just here, by the bye, that I solved 
an interesting etymological puzzle, to wit, 
the origin and precise meaning of the word 
"baygall," — a word which the visitor often 
hears upon the lips of Florida people. An 
old hunter in Smyrna, when I questioned 
him about it, told me that it meant a swampy 
piece of wood, and took its origin, he had 
always supposed, from the fact that bay- 
trees and gall-bushes commonly grew in 
such places. A Tallahassee gentleman 
agreed with this explanation, and promised 
to bring home some gall-berries the next 
time he came across any, that I might see 
what they were ; but the berries were never 
forthcoming, and I was none the wiser, till, 
on one of my last trips up the St. Augustine 
road, as I stood under the large magnolia 



160 ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE BO AD. 

just mentioned, a colored man came along, 
hat in hand, and a bag of grain balanced on 
his head. 

" That 's a large magnolia," said I. 

He assented. 

" That 's about as large as magnolias ever 
grow, is n't it ? " 

" No, sir ; down in the gall there 's mag- 
nolias a heap bigger 'n that." 

"A gall? What's that?" 

" A bay gall, sir." 

" And what 's a baygall ? " 

" A big wood." 

" And why do you call it a baygall? " 

He was stumped, it was plain to see. No 
doubt he would have scratched his head, if 
that useful organ had been accessible. He 
hesitated ; but it is n't like an uneducated 
man to confess ignorance. " 'Cause it 's a 
desert," he said, " a thick ^:>Zace." 

" Yes, yes," I answered, and he resumed 
his march. 

The road was traveled mostly by negroes. 
On Sunday afternoons it looked quite like 
a flower garden, it was so full of bright 
dresses coming home from church. " Now'- 
days folks git religion so easy ! " one young 



ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD, 161 

woman said to another, as they passed me. 
She was a conservative. I did not join the 
procession, but on other days I talked, first 
and last, with a good many of the people ; 
from the preacher, who carried a handsome 
cane and made me a still handsomer bow, 
down to a serious little fellow of six or seven 
years, whom I found standing at the foot of 
the hill, beside a bundle of dead wood. He 
was carrying it home for the family stove, 
and had set it down for a minute's rest. I 
said something about his burden, and as I 
went on he called after me : " What kind of 
birds are you hunting for? Ricebirds? " I 
answered that I was looking for birds of all 
sorts. Had he seen any ricebirds lately? 
Yes, he said ; he started a flock the other day 
up on ^ the hill. " How did they look ? " said 
I. " They is red blackbirds," he returned. 
This was not the first time I had heard the 
redwing called the ricebird. But how did 
the boy know me for a bird-gazer? That 
was a mystery. It came over me all at once 
that possibly I had become better known in 
the community than I had in the least sus- 

^ He did not say "upon" any more than Northern 
white boys do. 



162 ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 

pected; and then I remembered my field- 
glass. That, as I could not help being- 
aware, was an object of continual attention. 
Every day I saw people, old and young, 
black and white, looking at it with undis- 
guised curiosity. Often they passed audible 
comments upon it among themselves. " How 
far can you see through the spyglass ? " a 
bolder spirit would now and then venture to 
ask ; and once, on the railway track out in 
the pine lands, a barefooted, happy-faced 
urchin made a guess that was really admira- 
ble for its ingenuity. "Looks like you're 
goin' over inspectin' the wire," he remarked. 
On rare occasions, as an act of special grace, 
I offered such an inquirer a peep through the 
magic lenses, — an experiment that never 
failed to elicit exclamations of wonder. 
Thing^s were so near ! And the observer 
looked comically incredulous, on putting 
down the glass, to find how suddenly the 
landscape had slipped away again. More 
than one colored man wanted to know its 
price, and expressed a fervent desire to 
possess one like it ; and probably, if I had 
ever been assaulted and robbed in all my 
solitary wanderings through the flat-woods 



ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 163 

and other lonesome places, my " spyglass " 
rather than my purse — the "lust of the 
eye " rather than the " pride of life " — 
would have been to thank. 

Here, however, there could be no thought 
of such a contingency. Here were no vaga- 
bonds (one inoffensive Yankee sj)ecimen 
excepted), but hard-working people going 
into the city or out again, each on his own 
lawful business. Scarcely one of them, man 
or woman, but greeted me kindly. One, a 
white man on horseback, invited, and even 
urged me, to mount his horse, and let him 
walk a piece. I must be fatigued, he was 
sure, — how could I help it ? — and he 
would as soon walk as not. Finding me 
obstinate, he walked his horse at my side, 
chatting about the country, the trees, and 
the crops. He it was who called my partic- 
ular attention to the abundance of black- 
berry vines. " Are the berries sweet ? " I 
asked. He smacked his lij)s. " Sweet as 
honey, and big as that," measuring off a 
liberal portion of his thumb. I spoke of 
them half an hour later to a middle-aged 
colored man. Yes, he said, the blackberries 
were plenty enough and sweet enough ; but. 



164 ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 

for his part, he did n't trouble them a great 
deal. The vines (and he pointed at them, 
fringing the roadside indefinitely) were 
great places for rattlesnakes. He liked the 
berries, but he liked somebody else to pick 
them. He was awfully afraid of snakes; 
they were so dangerous. " Yes, sir " (this 
in answer to an inquiry), " there are plenty 
of rattlesnakes here clean up to Christmas." 
I liked him for his frank avowal of coward- 
ice, and still more for his quiet bearing. 
He remembered the days of slavery, — " be- 
fore the surrender," as the current Southern 
phrase is, — and his face beamed when I 
spoke of my joy in thinking that his peo- 
ple were free, no matter what might befall 
them. He, too, raised cotton on hired land, 
and was bringing up his children — there 
were eight of them, he said — to habits of 
industry. 

My second stroll toward St. Augustine 
carried me perhaps three miles, — say one 
sixty-sixth of the entire distance, — and 
none of my subsequent excursions took me 
any farther; and having just now com- 
mended a negro for his candor, I am moved 
to acknowledge that, between the sand un- 



ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 165 

derfoot and the sun overhead, I found the 
six miles, which I spent at least four hours 
in accomplishing, more fatiguing than twice 
that distance would have been over New 
Hampshire hills. If I were to settle in that 
country, I should probably fall into the 
way of riding more, and walking less. I 
remember thinking how comfortable a cer- 
tain ponderous black mammy looked, whom 
I met on one of these same sunny and sandy 
tramps. She sat in the very middle of a 
tipcart, with an old and truly picturesque 
man's hat on her head (quite in the fashion, 
feminine readers will notice), driving a one- 
horned ox with a pair of clothes-line reins. 
She was traveling slowly, just as I like to 
travel; and, as I say, I was impressed by 
her comfortable appearance. Why would 
not an equipage like that be just the thing 
for a naturalistic idler? 

Not far beyond my halting-place of two 
days before I came to a Cherokee rosebush, 
one of the most beautiful of plants, — white, 
fragrant, single roses (^real roses) set in the 
midst of the handsomest of glossy green 
leaves. I was delighted to find it still in 
flower. A hundred miles farther south I 



166 ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 

had seen it finishing its season a full month 
earlier. I stopped, of course, to pluck a 
blossom. At that moment a female redbird 
flew out of the bush. Her mate was beside 
her instantly, and a nameless something in 
their manner told me they were trying to 
keep a secret. The nest, built mainly of 
pine needles and other leaves, was in the 
middle of the bush, a foot or two from the 
grass, and contained two bluish or greenish 
eggs thickly spattered with dark brown. I 
meant to look into it again (the owners 
seemed to have no great objection), but 
somehow missed it every time I passed. 
From that point, as far as I went, the road 
was lined with Cherokee roses, — not con- 
tinuously, but with short intermissions ; and 
from the number of redbirds seen, almost 
invariably in pairs, I feel safe in saying that 
the nest I had found was probably one of 
fifteen or twenty scattered along the way- 
side. How gloriously the birds sang ! It 
was their day for singing. I was ready to 
christen the road anew, — Redbird Road. 

But the redbirds, many and conspicuous 
as they were, had no monopoly of the road 
or of the day. House wrens were equally 



ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 167 

numerous and equally at liome, tliougli they 
sang more out of sight. Red-eyed chewinks, 
still far from their native berry pastures, 
hopped into a bush to cry, " Who 's he ? " 
at the passing of a stranger, in whom, for 
aught I know, they may have half recognized 
an old acquaintance. A bunch of quails ran 
across the road a little in front of me, and 
in another place fifteen or twenty red-winged 
blackbirds (not a red wing among them) sat 
gossiping in a treetop. Elsewhere, even 
later than this (it was now April 7), I saw 
flocks, every bird of which wore shoulder- 
straps, — like the traditional militia com- 
pany, all officers. Thei/ did not gossip, of 
course (it is the male that sports the red), 
but they made a lively noise. 

As for the mocking-birds, they were at 
the front here, as they were everywhere. 
During my fortnight in Tallahassee there 
were never many consecutive five minutes of 
daylight in which, if I stopped to listen, 
I could not hear at least one mocker. 
Oftener two or three were singing at once 
in as many different directions. And, 
speaking of them, I must speak also of their 
more northern cousin. From the day I 



168 ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE BOAT). 

entered Florida I had been saying that the 
mocking-bird, save for his occasional mim- 
icry of other birds, sang so exactly like the 
thrasher that I did not believe I could tell 
one from the other. Now, however, on this 
St. Augustine road, I suddenly became 
aware of a bird singing somewhere in ad- 
vance, and as I listened again I said aloud, 
with full persuasion, " There ! that 's a 
thrasher ! " There was a something of dif- 
ference : a shade of coarseness in the voice, 
perhaps ; a tendency to force the tone, as 
we say of human singers, — a something, at 
all events, and the longer I hearkened, the 
more confident I felt that the bird was a 
thrasher. And so it was, — the first one I 
had heard in Florida, although I had seen 
many. Probably the two birds have pecu- 
liarities of voice and method that, with 
longer familiarity on the listener's part, 
would render them easily distinguishable. 
On general principles, I must believe that 
to be true of all birds. But the experience 
just described is not to be taken as prov- 
ing that / have any such familiarity. 
Within a week afterward, while walking 
along the railway, I came upon a thrasher 



ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 169 

and a mocking-bird singing side by side; 
the mocker upon a telegraph pole, and the 
thrasher on the wire, halfway between the 
mocker and the next pole. They sang and 
sang, while I stood between them in the cut 
below and listened ; and if my life had de- 
pended on my seeing how one song differed 
from the other, I could not have done it. 
With my eyes shut, the birds might have 
changed places, — if they could have done 
it quickly enough, — and I should have 
been none the wiser. 

As I have said, I followed the road over 
the nearly level plateau for what I guessed 
to be about three miles. Then I found my- 
self in a bit of hollow that seemed made 
for a stopping-place, with a plantation road 
running off to the right, and a hillside corn- 
field of many acres on the left. In the field 
were a few tall dead trees. At the tip of 
one sat a sparrow-hawk, and to the trunk 
of another clung a red-bellied woodpecker, 
who, with characteristic foolishness, sat be- 
side his hole calling persistently, and then, 
as if determined to publish what other birds 
so carefully conceal, went inside, thrust out 
his head, and resumed his clatter. Here, 



170 ON THE ST, AUGUSTINE ROAD. 

too, were a pair of bluebirds, noticeable for 
tbeir rarity, and for tlie wonderful color — 
a shade deeper than is ever seen at the 
North, I think — of the male's blue coat. 
In a small thicket in the hollow beside the 
road were noisy white-eyed vireos, a ruby- 
crowned kinglet, — a tiny thing that within 
a month would be singing in Canada, or 
beyond, — an unseen wood pewee, and (also 
unseen) a hermit thrush, one of perhaps 
twenty solitary individuals that I found 
scattered about the woods in the course of 
my journeyings. Not one of them sang a 
note. Probably they did not know that 
there was a Yankee in Florida who — in 
some moods, at least — would have given 
more for a dozen bars of hermit thrush mu- 
sic than for a day and a night of the mock- 
ing-bird's medley. Not that I mean to dis- 
parage the great Southern performer ; as a 
vocalist he is so far beyond the hermit thrush 
as to render a com23arison absurd ; but what 
I love is a singer, a voice to reach the soul. 
An old Tallahassee negro, near the " white 
Norman school," — so he called it, — hit off 
the mocking-bird pretty well. I had called 
his attention to one singing in an adjacent 



ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD, 171 

dooryard. " Yes," he said, " I love to hear 
'em. They 's very amusin', very amusin'." 
My own feeling can hardly be a prejudice, 
conscious or unconscious, in favor of what 
has grown dear to me through early and 
long-continued association. The difference 
between the music of birds like the mocker, 
the thrasher, and the catbird and that of 
birds like the hermit, the veery, and the 
wood thrush is one of kind, not of degree ; 
and I have heard music of the mocking- 
bird's kind (the thrasher's, that is to say) 
as long as I have heard music at all. The 
question is one of taste, it is true ; but it is 
not a question of familiarity or favoritism. 
All praise to the mocker and the thrasher ! 
May their tribe increase ! But if we are to 
indulge in comparisons, give me the wood 
thrush, the hermit, and the veery; with 
tones that the mocking-bird can never imi- 
tate, and a simplicity which the Fates — the 
wise Fates, who will have variety — have 
put forever beyond his appreciation and his 
reach. 

Florida as I saw it (let the qnalification 
be noted) is no more a land of flowers than 
New England. In some respects, indeed, it 



172 ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 

is less so. Flowering shrubs and climbers 
there are in abundance. I rode in the cars 
through miles on miles of flowering dog- 
wood and pink azalea. Here, on this Talla- 
hassee road, were miles of Cherokee roses, 
with plenty of the climbing scarlet honey- 
suckle (beloved of humming-birds, although 
I saw none here), and nearer the city, as 
already described, masses of lantana and 
white honeysuckle. In more than one place 
pink double roses (vagrants from cultivated 
grounds, no doubt) offered buds and blooms 
to all who would have them. The cross-vine 
(^Bigno7iici)^\ess freehanded, hung its showy 
bells out of reach in the treetops. Thorn- 
bushes of several kinds were in flower (a 
puzzling lot), and the treelike blueberry 
(^Vaccinium arhoreum)^ loaded with its 
large, flaring white corollas, was a real spec- 
tacle of beauty. Here, likewise, I found 
one tiny crab-apple shrub, with a few blos- 
soms, exquisitely tinted with rose-color, and 
most exquisitely fragrant. But the New 
Englander, when he talks of wild flowers, 
has in his eye something different from 
these. He is not thinking of any bush, 
no matter how beautiful, but of trailing 



ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE BOAD. 173 

arbutus, hepaticas, bloodroot, anemones, 
saxifrage, violets, dogtooth violets, spring- 
beauties, " cowslips," buttercups, corydalis, 
columbine, Dutchman's breeches, clintonia, 
five-finger, and all the rest of that bright 
and fragrant host which, ever since he can 
remember, he has seen covering his native 
hills and valleys with the return of May. 

It is not meant, of course, that plants 
like these are wholly wanting in Florida. I 
remember an abundance of violets, blue and 
white, especially in the flat-woods, where 
also I often found pretty butterworts of two 
or three sorts. The smaller blue ones took 
very acceptably the place of hepaticas, and 
indeed I heard them called by that name. 
But, as compared with what one sees in New 
England, such "ground flowers," flowers 
which it seems perfectly natural to pluck 
for a nosegay, were very little in evidence. 
I heard Northern visitors remark the fact 
again and again. On this pretty road out 
of Tallahassee — itseK a city of flower gar- 
dens — I can recall nothing of the kind 
except half a dozen strawberry blossoms, 
and the oxalis and specularia before men- 
tioned. Probably the round-leaved hous- 



174 ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 

tonia grew here, as it did everywhere, in 
small scattered patches. If there were vio- 
lets as well, I can only say I have forgotten 
them. 

Be it added, however, that at the time I 
did not miss them. In a garden of roses 
one does not begin by sighing for mignonette 
and lilies of the valley. Violets or no violets, 
there was no lack of beauty. The Southern 
highway surveyor, if such a personage exists, 
is evidently not consumed by that distressing 
puritanical passion for " slicking up things " 
which too often makes of his Northern 
brother something scarcely better than a pub- 
lic nuisance. At the South you will not find 
a woman cultivating with pain a few exotics 
beside the front door, while her husband is 
mowing and burning the far more attractive 
wild garden that nature has planted just out- 
side the fence. The St. Augustine road, at 
any rate, after climbing the hiU and getting 
beyond the wood, runs between natural 
hedges, — trees, vines, and shrubs carelessly 
intermingled, — not dense enough to con- 
ceal the prospect or shut out the breeze 
(" straight from the Gulf, " as the Tallahas- 
sean is careful to inform you), but sufficient 



ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 175 

to afford much welcome protection from the 
sun. Here it was good to find the sassafras 
growing side by side with the persimmon, al- 
though when, for old acquaintance' sake, I 
put a leaf into my mouth I was half glad to 
fancy it a thought less savory than some I 
had tasted in Yankeeland. 1 took a kind of 
foolish satisfaction, too, in the obvious fact 
that certain plants — the sumach and the 
Virginia creeper, to mention no others — 
were less at home here than a thousand miles 
farther north. AYith the wild-cherry trees, I 
was obliged to confess, the case was reversed. 
I had seen larger ones in Massachusetts, per- 
haps, but none that looked half so clean and 
thrifty. In truth, their appearance was a 
puzzle, rum-cherry trees as by all tokens they 
undoubtedly were, till of a sudden it flashed 
upon me that there were no caterpillars' nests 
in them ! Then I ceased to wonder at their 
odd look. It spoke well for my botanical 
acumen that I had recognized them at all. 

Before I had been a week- in Tallahassee 
I found that, without forethought or plan, I 
had dropped into the habit (and how pleas- 
ant it is to think that some good habits ca?i 
be dropped into !) of making the St. Angus- 



176 ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE EOAD. 

tine road my after-dinner saunter ing-place. 
The morning was for a walk : to Lake Brad- 
ford, perhaps, in search of a mythical ivory- 
billed woodpecker, or westward on the rail- 
way for a few miles, with a view to rare 
migratory warblers. But in the afternoon I 
did not walk, — I loitered ; and though I still 
minded the birds and flowers, I for the most 
part forgot my botany and ornithology. In 
the cool of the day, then (the phrase is an 
innocent euphemism), I climbed the hill, 
and after an hour or two on the plateau 
strolled back again, facing the sunset through 
a vista of moss-covered live-oaks and sweet 
gums. Those quiet, incurious hours are 
among the pleasantest of all my Florida 
memories. A cuckoo would be cooing, per- 
haps ; or a quail, with cheerful ambiguity, — 
such as belongs to weather predictions in 
general, — would be prophesying " more 
wet " and " no more wet " in alternate 
breaths ; or two or three night-hawks would 
be sweeping back and forth high above the 
valley ; or a marsh hawk would be quartering 
over the big oatfield. The martins would be 
cackling, in any event, and the kingbirds 
practicing their aerial mock somersaults ; and 



ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE BOAD. 177 

the mocking-bird would be singing, and the 
redbird whistling. On the western slope, 
just below the oatfield, the Northern woman 
who owned the pretty cottage there (the 
only one on the road) was sure to be at work 
among her flowers. A laughing colored boy 
who did chores for her (without injury to his 
health, I could warrant) told me that she was 
a Northerner. But I knew it already; I 
needed no witness but her beds of petunias. 
In the valley, as I crossed the railroad track, 
a loggerhead shrike sat, almost of course, on 
the telegraph wire in dignified silence ; and 
just beyond, among the cabins, I had my 
choice of mocking-birds and orchard orioles. 
And so, admiring the roses and the pome- 
granates, the lantanas and the honeysuckles, 
or chatting with some dusky fellow-pilgrim, 
I mounted the hill to the city, and likely as 
not saw before me a red-headed woodpecker 
sitting on the roof of the State House, calling 
attention to his patriotic self — in his tri- 
colored dress — by occasional vigorous tat- 
toos on the tinned ridgepole. I never saw 
him there without gladness. The legislature 
had begun its session in an economical 
mood, — as is more or less the habit of legis- 



178 ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 

latures, I believe, — and was even consider- 
ing a proposition to reduce the salary and 
mileage of its members. Under such cir- 
cumstances, it ought not to have been a mat- 
ter of surprise, perhaps, that no flag floated 
from the cupola of the capitol. The people's 
money should not be wasted. And possibly 
I should never have remarked the omission 
but for a certain curiosity, natural, if not in- 
evitable, on the part of a Northern visitor, as 
to the real feeling of the South toward the 
national government. Day after day I had 
seen a portly gentleman — with an air, or 
with airs, as the spectator might choose to 
express it — going in and out of the State 
House gate, dressed ostentatiously in a suit 
of Confederate gray. He had worn nothing 
else since the war, I was told. But of course 
the State of Florida was not to be judged by 
the freak of one man, and he only a member 
of the " third house. " And even when I 
went into the governor's office, and saw the 
original " ordinance of secession " hanging 
in a conspicuous place on the wall, as if it 
were an heirloom to be proud of, I felt no 
stirring of sectional animosity, thorough-bred 
Massachusetts Yankee and old-fashioned 



ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD. 179 

abolitionist as I am. A brave people can 
hardly be expected or desired to forget its 
history, especially when that history has to 
do with sacrifices and heroic deeds. But 
these things, taken together, did no doubt 
prepare me to look upon it as a happy coin- 
cidence when, one morning, I heard the fa- 
miliar cry of the red-headed woodpecker, for 
the first time in Florida, and looked up to 
see him flying the national colors from the 
ridgepole of the State House. I did not 
break out with " Three cheers for the red, 
white, and blue ! " I am naturally undemon- 
strative ; but I said to myself that Melaner- 
pes erythroce'plialus was a very handsome 
bird. 



ORNITHOLOGY ON A COTTON PLAN- 
TATION. 

On one of my first jaunts into the sub- 
urbs of Tallahassee I noticed not far from 
the road a bit of swamp, — shallow pools 
with muddy borders and flats. It was a 
likely spot for " waders," and would be 
worth a visit. To reach it, indeed, I must 
cross a planted field surrounded by a lofty 
barbed-wire fence and placarded against 
trespassers ; but there was no one in sight, 
or no one who looked at all like a land- 
owner ; and, besides, it could hardly be ac- 
counted a trespass — defined by Blackstone 
as an " unwarranted entry on another's 
soil " — to step carefully over the cotton 
rows on so legitimate an errand. Ordinarily 
I call myself a simple bird-gazer, an ama- 
teur, a field naturalist, if you will; but on 
occasions like the present I assume — with 
myself, that is — all the rights and titles of 
an ornithologist proper, a man of science 
strictly so called. In the interest of science, 



A COTTON PLANTATION. 181 

then, I climbed the fence and picked my 
way across the field. True enough, about 
the edges of the water were two or three 
solitary sandpipers, and at least half a 
dozen of the smaller yellowlegs, — two ad- 
ditions to my Florida list, — not to speak of 
a little blue heron and a green heron, the 
latter in most uncommonly green plumage. 
It was well I had interpreted the placard 
a little generously. " The letter killeth " 
is a pretty good text in emergencies of this 
kind. So I said to myself. The herons, 
meanwhile, had taken French leave, but 
the smaller birds were less suspicious ; I 
watched them at my leisure, and left them 
still feeding. 

Two days later I was there again, but it 
must be acknowledged that this time I tar- 
ried in the road till a man on horseback had 
disappeared round the next turn. It would 
have been manlier, without doubt, to pay 
no attention to him ; but something told me 
that he was the cotton-planter himself, and, 
for better or worse, prudence carried the day 
with me. Finding nothing new, though the 
sandpipers and yellowlegs were still present, 
with a very handsome little blue heron and 



182 A COTTON PLANTATION. 

plenty of blackbirds, I took the road again 
and went further, and an hour or two after- 
ward, on getting back to the same place, was 
overtaken again by the horseman. He 
pulled up his horse and bade me good-after- 
noon. Would I lend him my opera-glass,, 
which happened to be in my hand at the 
moment ? "I should like to see how my 
house looks from here," he said ; and he 
pointed across the field to a house on the 
hill some distance beyond. " Ah," said I, 
glad to set myself right by a piece of frank- 
ness that under the circumstances could 
hardly work to my disadvantage ; "' then it 
is your land on which I have been tres- 
passing." " How so ? " he asked, with a 
smile ; and I explained that I had been 
across his cotton-field a little while before. 
" That is no trespass," he answered (so the 
reader will perceive that I had been quite 
correct in my understanding of the law) ; 
and when I went on to explain my object in 
visiting his cane-swamp (for such it was, he 
said, but an unexpected freshet had ruined 
the crop when it was barely out of the 
ground), he assured me that I was welcome 
to visit it as often as I wished. He himself 



A COTTON PLANTATION. 183 

was very fond of natural history, and often 
regretted that he had not given thne to it 
in his youth. As it was, he protected the 
birds on his plantation, and the place was 
full of them. I should find his woods inter- 
esting, he felt sure. Florida was extremely 
rich in birds ; he believed there were some 
that had never been classified. " We have 
orioles here," he added ; and so far, at any 
rate, he was right ; I had seen perhaps 
twenty that day (orchard orioles, that is), 
and one sat in a tree before us at the mo- 
ment. His whole manner was most kindly 
and hospitable, — as was that of every Talla- 
hassean with whom I had occasion to speak, 
— and I told him with sincere gratitude that 
I should certainly avail myself of his cour- 
tesy and stroll through his woods. 

I approached them, two mornings after- 
ward, from the opposite side, where, find- 
ing no other place of entrance, I climbed a 
six-barred, tightly locked gate — feeling all 
the while like " a thief and a robber " — in 
front of a deserted cabin. Then I had only 
to cross a grassy field, in which meadow larks 
were singing, and I was in the woods. I 
wandered through them without finding any- 



184 A COTTON PLANTATION. 

thing more unusual or interesting than sum- 
mer tanagers and yellow-throated warblers, 
which were in song there, as they were in 
every such place, and after a while came out 
into a pleasant glade, from which different 
parts of the plantation could be seen, and 
through which ran a plantation road. Here 
was a wooden fence, — a most unusual thing, 
— r- and I lost no time in mounting it, to rest 
and look about me. It is one of the marks 
of a true Yankee, I suspect, to like such a 
perch. My own weakness in that direction 
is a frequent subject of mirth with chance 
fellow travelers. The attitude is comforta- 
ble and conducive to meditation ; and now 
that I was seated and at my ease, I felt that 
this was one of the New England luxuries 
which, almost without knowing it, I had 
missed ever since I left home. 

Of my meditations on this particular oc- 
casion I remember nothing ; but that is no 
sign they were valueless; as it is no sign 
that yesterday's dinner did me no good be- 
cause I have forgotten what it was. In the 
latter case, indeed, and perhaps in the for- 
mer as well, it would seem more reasonable 
to draw an exactly opposite inference. But, 



A COTTON PLANTATION. 185 

quibbles apart, one thing I do remember : I 
sat for some time on tlie fence, in the shade 
of a tree, with an eye upon the cane-swamp 
and an ear open for bird-voices. Yes, and 
it comes to me at this moment that here I 
heard the first and only bull-frog that I heard 
anywhere in Florida. It was like a voice 
from home, and belonged with the fence. 
Other frogs I had heard in other places. 
One chorus brought me out of bed in Day- 
tona — in the evening — after a succession 
of February dog-day showers. " What is 
that noise outside ? " I inquired of the land- 
lady as I hastened downstairs. "That?" 
said she, with a look of amusement ; " that 's 
frogs." " It may be, " I thought, but I 
followed the sounds till they led me in the 
darkness to the edge of a swamp. No doubt 
the creatures were frogs, but of some kind 
new to me, with voices more lugubrious 
and homesick than I should have supposed 
could possibly belong to any batrachian. A 
week or two later, in the New Smyrna flat- 
woods, I heard in the distance a sound which 
I took for the grunting of pigs. I made 
a note of it, mentally, as a cheerful token, 
indicative of a probable scarcity of rattle- 



186 A COTTON PLANTATION. 

snakes ; but by and by, as I drew nearer, 
the truth of the matter began to break upon 
me. A man was approaching, and when 
we met I asked him what was making that 
noise yonder. "Frogs," he said. At an- 
other time, in the flat-woods of Port Orange 
(I hope I am not taxing my reader's credu- 
lity too far, or making myself out a man of 
too imaginative an ear), I heard the bleating 
of sheep. Busy with other things, I did not 
stop to reflect that it was impossible there 
should be sheep in that quarter, and the 
occurrence had quite passed out of my 
mind when, one day, a cracker, talking about 
frogs, happened to say, " Yes, and we have 
one kind that makes a noise exactly like the 
bleating of sheep." That, without question, 
was what I had heard in the flat-woods. But 
this frog in the sugar-cane swamp was the 
same fellow that on summer evenings, ever 
and ever so many years ago, in sonorous bass 
that could be heard a quarter of a mile away, 
used to call from Reuben Loud's pond, 
" Pull him in I Pull him in ! " or some- 
times (the inconsistent amphibian), " Jug o' 
rum ! Jug o' rum ! " 

I dismounted from my perch at last, and 



A. COTTON PLANTATION. 187 

was sauDtering idly along tlie patli (idleness 
like this is often the best of ornithological 
industry), when suddenly I had a vision ! 
Before me, in the leafy top of an oak sap- 
ling, sat a blue grosbeak. I knew him on 
the instant. But I could see only his head 
and neck, the rest of his body being hidden 
by the leaves. It was a moment of feverish 
excitement. Here was a new bird, a bird 
about which I had felt fifteen years of curi- 
osity ; and, more than that, a bird which here 
and now was quite unexpected, since it was 
not included in either of the two Florida 
lists that I had brought with me from home. 
For perhaps five seconds I had my opera- 
glass on the blue head and the thick-set, 
dark bill, with its lighter-colored under 
mandible. Then I heard the clatter of a 
horse's hoofs, and lifted my eyes. My friend 
the owner of the plantation was coming 
down the road at a gallop, straight upon me. 
If I was to see the grosbeak and make sure 
of him, it must be done at once. I moved 
to bring him fully into view, and he flew 
into the thick of a pine-tree out of sight. 

But the tree was not far off, and if Mr. 

would pass me with a nod, the case was still 



188 A COTTON PLANTATION. 

far from hopeless. A bright thought came 
to me. I ran from the path with a great 
show of eager absorption, leveled my glass 
npon the pine-tree, and stood fixed. Per- 
haps Mr. would take the hint. Alas ! 

he had too much courtesy to pass his own 
guest without speaking. " Still after the 
birds ? " he said, as he checked his horse. I 
responded, as I hope, without any symptom 
of annoyance. Then, of course, he wished to 
know what I was looking at, and I told him 
that a blue grosbeak had just flown into that 
pine-tree, and that I was most distressingly 
anxious to see more of him. He looked at 
the pine-tree. "I can't see him," he said. 
No more could I. " It was n't a blue jay, 
was it ? " he asked. And then we talked of 
one thing and another, I have no idea what, 
till he rode away to another part of the plan- 
tation where a gang of women were at work. 
By this time the grosbeak had disappeared 
utterly. Possibly he had gone to a bit of 
wood on the opposite side of the cane-swamp. 
I scaled a barbed-wire fence and made in 
that direction, but to no purpose. The gros- 
beak was gone for good. Probably I should 
never see another. Could the planter have 



A COTTON PLANTATION. 189 

read my thoiiglits just then he would perhaps 
have been angry with himself, and pretty 
certainly he would have been angry with me. 
That a Yankee should accept his hospitality, 
and then load him with curses and call him 
all manner of names ! How should he know 
that I was so insane a hobbyist as to care 
more for the sight of a new bird than for all 
the laws and customs of ordinary politeness ? 
As my feelings cooled, I saw that I was step- 
ping over hills or rows of some strange-look- 
ing plants just out of the ground. Peanuts, 
I guessed ; but to make sure I called to a 
colored woman who was hoeing not far off. 
"What are these?" "Finders," she an- 
swered. I knew she meant peanuts, — other- 
wise "ground-peas" and "goobers," — and 
now that I once more have a dictionary at my 
elbow I learn that the word, like " goober," 
is, or is supposed to be, of African origin. 

I was preparing to surmount the barbed- 
wire fence again, when the planter returned 
and halted for another chat. It was evident 
that he took a genuine and amiable interest 
in my researches. There were a great many 
kinds of sparrows in that country, he said, 
and also of woodpeckers. He knew the 



190 A COTTON PLANTATION. 

ivory-bill, but, like other Tallahasseans, he 
thought I should have to go into Lafayette 
County (all Florida people say La/(2?/ette) 
to find it. " That bird calling now is a bee- 
bird," he said, referring to a kingbird ; " and 
we have a bird that is called the French 
mocking-bird ; he catches other birds." The 
last remark was of interest for its bearing 
upon a point about which I had felt some 
curiosity, and, I may say, some skepticism, 
as I had seen many loggerhead shrikes, but 
had observed no indication that other birds 
feared them or held any grudge against them. 
As he rode off he called my attention to a 
great blue heron just then flying over the 
swamp. "They are very shy," he said. 
Then, from further away, he shouted once 
more to ask if I heard the mocking-bird 
singing yonder, pointing with his whip in 
the direction of the singer. 

For some time longer I hung about the 
glade, vainly hoping that the grosbeak would 
again favor my eyes. Then I crossed more 
planted fields, — climbing more barbed-wire 
fences, and stopping on the way to enjoy the 
sweetly quaint music of a little chorus of 
white-crowned sparrows, — and skirted once 



A COTTON PLANTATION. 191 

more the muddy shore of the cane-swamp, 
where the yellowlegs and sandpipers were 
still feeding. That brought me to the road 
from which I had made my entry to the 
place some days before; but, being still 
unable to forego a splendid possibility, I 
recrossed the plantation, tarried again in 
the glade, sat again on the wooden fence (if 
that grosbeak only would show himself!), 
and thence went on, picking a few heads of 
handsome buffalo clover, the first I had ever 
seen, and some sprays of penstemon, till I 
came again to the six-barred gate and the 
Quincy road. At that point, as I now re- 
member, the air was full of vultures (carrion 
crows), a hundred or more, soaring over the 
fields in some fit of gregariousness. Along 
the road were white - crowned and white- 
throated sparrows (it was the 12th of April), 
orchard orioles, thrashers, summer tanagers, 
myrtle and paim warblers, cardinal gros- 
beaks, mocking-birds, kingbirds, logger- 
heads, yellow - throated vireos, and sundry 
others, but not the blue grosbeak, which 
would have been worth them all. 

Once back at the hotel, I opened my 
Coues's Key to refresh my memory as to 



192 A COTTON PLANTATION. 

the exact appearance of that bird. " Feath- 
ers around base of bill black," said the book. 
I had not noticed that. But no matter ; the 
bird was a blue grosbeak, for the sufficient 
reason that it could not be anything else. 
A black line between the almost black beak 
and the dark-blue head would be inconspic- 
uous at the best, and quite naturally would 
escape a glimpse so hasty as mine had been. 
And yet, while I reasoned in this way, I 
foresaw plainly enough that, as time passed, 
doubt would get the better of assurance, 
as it always does, and I should never be cer- 
tain that I had not been the victim of some 
illusion. At best, the evidence was worth 
nothing for others. If only that excellent 

Mr. , for whose kindness I was unfeign- 

edly thankful (and whose pardon I most 
sincerely beg if I seem to have been a bit too 
free in this rehearsal of the story), — if only 

Mr. could have left me alone for ten 

minutes longer ! 

The worry and the imprecations were 
wasted, after all, as. Heaven be thanked, 
they so often are ; for within two or three 
days I saw other blue grosbeaks and heard 
them sing. But that was not on a cotton 
plantation, and is part of another story. 



A FLORIDA SHRINE. 

All pilgrims to Tallahassee visit the Mu- 
rat place. It is one of the most conveniently 
accessible of those " points of interest " with 
which gnide-books so anxiously, and with so 
much propriety, concern themselves. What 
a tourist prays for is something to see. If 
I had ever been a tourist in Boston, no 
doubt I should before now have surveyed 
the world from the top of the Bunker Hill 
monument. In Tallahassee, at aU events, I 
went to the Murat estate. In fact, I went 
more than once ; but I remember especially 
my first visit, which had a livelier senti- 
mental interest than the others because I 
was then under the agreeable delusion that 
the Prince himself had lived there. The 
guide-book told me so, vouchsafing also the 
information that after building the house he 
" interested himself actively in local affairs, 
became a naturalized citizen, and served 
successively as postmaster, alderman, and 
mayor " — a model immigrant, surely, 



194 A FLORIDA SHRINE. 

thougli it is rather the way of immigrants, 
perhaps, not to refuse political responsibili- 
ties. 

Naturally, I remembered these things as 
I stood in front of " the big house " — a 
story-and-a-half cottage — amid the flower- 
ins: shrubs. Here lived once the son of the 
King of Naples ; himself a Prince, and — 
worthy son of a worthy sire — alderman and 
then mayor of the city of Tallahassee. Thus 
did an uncompromising democrat pay court 
to the shades of Koyalty, while a mocking- 
bird sang from a fringe-bush by the gate, 
and an oriole flew madly from tree to tree 
in pursuit of a fair creature of the reluctant 
sex. 

The inconsistency, if such it was, was 
quickly punished. For, alas ! when I spoke 
of my morning's pilgrimage to an old resi- 
dent of the town, he told me that Murat 
never lived in the house, nor anywhere else 
in Tallahassee, and of course was never its 
postmaster, alderman, or mayor. The Prin- 
cess, he said, built the house after her hus- 
band's death, and lived there, a widow. I 
appealed to the guide-book. My informant 
sneered, — politely, — and brought me a 



A FLORIDA SHRINE. 195 

still older Tallahassean, Judge , whose 

venerable name I am sorry to have forgot- 
ten, and that indisputable citizen confirmed 
all that his neighbor had said. For once, 
the guide-book compiler must have been 
misinformed. 

The question, happily, was one of no great 
consequence. If the Prince had never lived 
in the house, the Princess had ; and she, by 
all accounts (and I make certain her hus- 
band would have said the same), was the 
worthier person of the two. And even if 
neither of them had lived there, if my sen- 
timent had been all wasted (but there was 
no question of tears), the place itself was 
sightly, the house was old, and the way 
thither a pleasant one — first down the hill 
in a zigzag course to the vicinity of the rail- 
way station, then by a winding country road 
through the valley past a few negro cabins, 
and up the slope on the farther side. Prince 
Murat, or no Prince Murat, I should love to 
travel that road to-day, instead of sitting 
before a Massachusetts fire, with the ground 
deep under snow, and the air full of thirty 
or forty degrees of frost. 

In the front yard of one of the cabins op- 



196 A FLORIDA SHRINE. 

posite the car-wheel foundry, and near the 
station, as I now remember, a middle-aged 
negress was cutting up an oak log. She 
swung the axe with vigor and precision, and 
the chips flew ; but I could not help saying, 
" You ouo:ht to make the man do that." 

She answered on the instant. " I would," 
she said, " if I had a man to makeJ^ 

" I 'm sure you would," I thought. Her 
tongue was as sharp as her axe. 

Ought I to have ventured a word in her 
behalf, I wonder, when a man of her own 
color, and a pretty near neighbor, told me 
with admirable ndivete the story of his be- 
reavement and his hopes? His wife had 
died a year before, he said, and so far, 
though he had not let the grass grow under 
his feet, he had found no one to take her 
place. He still meant to do so, if he could. 
He was only seventy-four years old, and it 
was not good for a man to be alone. He 
seemed a gentle spirit, and I withheld all 
mention of the stalwart and manless wood- 
cutter. I hope he went farther, and fared 
better. So youthful as he was, surely there 
was no occasion for haste. 

When I had skirted a cotton-field — the 



A FLORIDA SHBINE. 197 

crop just out of the ground — and a bit of 
wood on the right, and a swamp with a splen- 
did display of white water-lilies on the left, 
and had begun to ascend the gentle slope, 
I met a man of considerably more than 
seventy-four years. 

" Can you tell me just where the Murat 
place is ? " I inquired. 

He grinned broadly, and thought he could. 
He was one of the old Murat servants, as 
his father had been before him. " I was 
borned on to him," he said, speaking of the 
Prince. Murat was " a gentleman, sah." 
That was a statement which it seemed im- 
possible for him to repeat often enough. 
He spoke from a slave's point of view. Mu- 
rat was a good master. The old man had 
heard him say that he kept servants " for 
the like of the thing." He didn't abuse 
them. He "never was for barbarizing a 
poor colored person at all." Whipping? 
Oh, yes. " He did n't miss your fault. No, 
sah, he didn't miss your fault." But his 
servants never were " ironed." He " did n't 
believe in barbarousment." 

The old man was thankfid to be free ; but 
to his mind emancipation had not made 



198 A FLORIDA SHRINE. 

everything heavenly. The younger set of 
negroes (" my people " was his word) were 
on the wrong road. They had " sold their 
birthright," though exactly what he meant 
by that remark I did not gather. " They 
ain't got no sense," he declared, " and what 
sense they has got don't do 'em no good." 

I told him finally that I was from the 
North. " Oh, I knows it," he exclaimed, " I 
knows it ; " and he beamed with delight. 
How did he know, I inquired. " Oh, I 
knows it. I can see it in you. Anybody 
would know it that had any jedgment at all. 
You's a perfect gentleman, sah." He was 
too old to be quarreled with, and I swal- 
lowed the compliment. 

I tore myself away, or he might have run 
on till night — about his old master and mis- 
tress, the division of the estate, an abusive 
overseer (" he was a perfect dog, sah ! "), and 
sundry other things. He had lived a long 
time, and had nothing to do now but to re- 
call the past and tell it over. So it will be 
with us, if we live so long. May we find 
once in a while a patient listener. 

This patriarch's unfavorable opinion as to 
the prospects of the colored people was 



A FLORIDA SHRINE. 199 

shared by my hopeful young widower before 
mentioned, who expressed himself quite as 
emphatically. He was brought up among 
white people (" I 's been taughted a heap," 
he said), and believed that the salvation of 
the blacks lay in their recognition of white 
supremacy. But he was less perspicacious 
than the older man. He was one of the 
very few persons whom I met at the South 
who did not recognize me at sight as a Yan- 
kee. " Are you a legislator-man ? " he 
asked, at the end of our talk. The legisla- 
ture was in session on the hill. But per- 
haps, after all, he only meant to flatter me. 

If I am long on the way, it is because, as 
I love always to have it, the going and com- 
ing were the better part of the pilgrimage. 
The estate itself is beautifully situated, with 
far-away horizons ; but it has fallen into 
great neglect, while the house, almost in 
ruins, and occupied by colored people, is to 
Northern eyes hardly more than a larger 
cabin. It put me in mind of the question 
of a Western gentleman whom I met at St. 
Augustine. He had come to Florida against 
his will, the weather and the doctor having 
combined against him, and was looking at 



200 A FLORIDA SHEINE. 

everything tlirougli very blue spectacles. 
" Have you seen any of those fine old coun- 
try mansions," he asked, " about which we 
read so often in descriptions of Southern 
life ? " He had been on the lookout for 
them, he averred, ever since he left home, and 
had yet to find the first one ; and from his 
tone it was evident that he thought the 
Southern idea of a " fine old mansion " 
must be different from his. 

The Murat house, certainly, was never a 
palace, except as love may have made it so. 
But it was old ; people had lived in it, and 
died in it ; those who once owned it, whose 
name and memory still clung to it, were 
now in narrower houses ; and it was easy 
for the visitor — for one visitor, at least 
— to fall into pensive meditation. I 
strolled about the grounds; stood be- 
tween the last year's cotton-rows, while 
a Carolina wren poured out his soul from 
an oleander bush near by ; admired the 
confidence of a pair of shrikes, who had 
made a nest in a honeysuckle vine in 
the front yard ; listened to the sweet mu- 
sic of mocking-birds, cardinals, and orchard 
orioles ; watched the martins circling above 



A FLORIDA SHRINE. 201 

the trees ; thought of the Princess, and 
smiled at the black children who thrust 
their heads out of the windows of her " big 
house ; " and then, with a sprig of honey- 
suckle for a keepsake, I started slowly 
homeward. 

The sun by this time was straight over- 
head, but my umbrella saved me from abso- 
lute discomfort, while birds furnished here 
and there an agreeable diversion. I recall 
in particular some white-crowned sparrows, 
the first ones I had seen in Florida. At a 
bend in the road opposite the water-lily 
swamp, while I was cooling myself in the 
shade of a friendly pine-tree, — enjoying at 
the same time a fence overrun with Chero- 
kee roses, — a man and his little boy came 
along in a wagon. The man seemed really 
disappointed when I told him that I was go- 
ing into town, instead of coming from it. 
It was pretty warm weather for walking, and 
he had meant to offer me a lift. He was a 
Scandinavian, who had been for some years 
in Florida. He owned a good farm not far 
from the Murat estate, which latter he had 
been urged to buy ; but he thought a man 
was n't any better off for owning too much 



202 A FLORIDA SHRINE, 

land. He talked of his crops, his children, 
the climate, and so on, all in a cheerful 
strain, pleasant to hear. If the pessimists 
are right, — which may I be kept from be- 
lieving, — the optimists are certainly more 
comfortable to live with, though it be only 
for ten minutes under a roadside shade-tree. 

When I reached the street-car track at 
the foot of the hill, the one car which plies 
back and forth through the city was in its 
place, with the driver beside it, but no 
mules. 

"Are you going to start directly?" I 
asked. 

" Yes, sah," he answered ; and then, look- 
ing toward the stable, he shouted in a per- 
emptory voice, " Do about, there ! Do 
about ! " 

" What does that mean? " said I. " Hurry 
up?" 

" Yes, sah, that 's it. 'T ain't everybody 
that wants to be hurried up ; so we tells 'em, 
' Do about ! ' " 

Half a minute afterwards two very neatly 
dressed little colored boys stepped upon the 
rear platform. 

" Where you goin' ? " said the driver. 
"Uptown?" 



A FLORIDA SHBINE. 203 

They said they were. 

" Well, come inside. Stay out there, and 
you '11 git hurt and cost this dried-up com- 
pany more money than you's wuth." 

They dropped into seats by the rear door. 
He motioned them to the front corner. 
" Sit down there," he said, " right there." 
They obeyed, and as he turned away he 
added, what I found more and more to be 
true, as I saw more of him, " I ain't de boss, 
but I 's got right smart to say." 

Then he whistled to the mules, flourished 
his whip, and to a persistent accompaniment 
of whacks and whistles we went crawling up 
the hill. 



WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

I ARKIVED at Tallahassee, from Jackson- 
ville, late in the afternoon, after a hot and 
dusty ride of more than eight hours. The 
distance is only a hundred and sixty odd 
miles, I believe ; but with some bright ex- 
ceptions. Southern railroads, like Southern 
men, seem to be under the climate, and 
schedule time is more or less a formality. 

For the first two thirds of the way the 
country is flat and barren. Happily, I sat 
within earshot of an amateur political econo- 
mist, who, like myself, was journeying to 
the State capital. By birth and education 
he was a New York State man, I heard 
him say ; an old abolitionist, who had voted 
for Birney, Fremont, and all their successors 
down to Hayes — the only vote he was ever 
ashamed of. Now he was a " greenbacker." 
The country was going to the dogs, and all 
because the government did not furnish 
money enough. The people would find it 
out some time, he guessed. He talked as a 



WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 205 

bird sings — for his own pleasure. But I 
was pleased, too. His was an amiable en- 
thusiasm, quite exempt, as it seemed, from 
all that bitterness, which an exclusive pos- 
session of the truth so commonly engenders. 
He was greatly in earnest ; he knew he was 
right ; but he could still see the comical side 
of things ; he still had a sense of the ludi- 
crous ; and in that lay Iiis salvation. For a 
sense of the ludicrous is the best of mental 
antiseptics ; it, if anything, will keep our 
perishable human nature sweet, and save 
it from the madhouse. His discourse was 
punctuated throughout with quiet laughter. 
Thus, when he said, " / call it the late Re- 
publican party," it was with a chuckle so 
good-natured, so free from acidity and self- 
conceit, that only a pretty stiff partisan 
could have taken offense. Even his predic- 
tions of impending national ruin were deliv- 
ered with numberless merry quips and 
twinkles. Many good Republicans and 
good Democrats (the adjective is used in its 
political sense) might have envied him his 
sunny temper, joined, as it was, to a good 
stock of native shrewdness. For something 
in his eye made it plain that, with all his 



206 WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

other qualities, our merry greenbacker was 
a reasonably competent band at a bargain ; 
so that I was not in the least surprised 
when his seat-mate told me afterward, in a 
tone of much respect, that the " Colonel " 
owned a very comfortable property at St. 
Augustine. But his best possession, I still 
thought, was his humor and his own gener- 
ous appreciation of it. To enjoy one's own 
jokes is to have a pretty safe insurance 
against inward adversity. 

Happily, I say, this good-humored talker 
sat within hearing. Happily, too, it was 
now — April 4 — the height of the season 
for flowering dogwood, pink azalea, fringe- 
bushes, Cherokee roses, and water lilies. 
All these had blossomed abundantly, and 
mile after mile the wilderness and the soli- 
tary place were glad for them. Here and 
there, also, I caught flying glimpses of 
some unknown plant bearing a long upright 
raceme of creamy-white flowers. It might 
be a white lupine, I thought, till at one of 
our stops between stations it happened to be 
growing within reach. Then I guessed it to 
be a Baptisia^ which guess was afterward 
confirmed — to my regret ; for the flowers 



WALES ABOUT TALLAHASSEE, 207 

lost at once all their attractiveness. So 
ineffaceable (oftenest for good, but this time 
for ill) is an early impression upon the least 
honorably esteemed of the five senses ! As 
a boy, it was one of my tasks to keep down 
with a scythe the weeds and bushes in a 
rocky, thin-soiled cattle pasture. In that 
task, — which, at the best, was a little too 
much like work — my most troublesome 
enemy was the common wild indigo (Bcqjti- 
sia tinctoria), partly from the wicked perti- 
nacity with which it sprang up again after 
every mowing, but especially from the fact 
that the cut or bruised stalk exhaled what 
in my nostrils was a most abominable odor. 
Other people do not find it so offensive, I 
suspect, but to me it was, and is, ten times 
worse than the more pungent but compara- 
tively salubrious perfume which a certain 
handsome little black-and-white quadruped 
— handsome, but impolite — is given to 
scattering upon the nocturnal breeze in mo- 
ments of extreme perturbation. 

Somewhere beyond the Suwanee River 
(at which I looked as long as it remained in 
sight — and thought of Christine Nilsson) 
there came a sudden change in the aspect of 



208 WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

tlie country, coincident with a change in the 
nature of the soil, from white sand to red 
clay ; a change indescribably exhilarating to 
a New Englander who had been living, if only 
for two months, in a country without hills. 
How good it was to see the land rising, 
though never so gently, as it stretched away 
toward the horizon ! My spirits rose with 
it. By and by we passed extensive hillside 
plantations, on which little groups of ne- 
groes, men and women, were at work. I 
seemed to see the old South of which I had 
read and dreamed, a South not in the least 
like anything to be found in the wilds of 
southern and eastern Florida ; a land of cot- 
ton, and, better still, a land of Southern 
people, instead of Northern tourists and set- 
tlers. And when we stopped at a thrifty- 
looking village, with neat, homelike houses, 
open grounds, and lordly shade-trees, I 
found myself saying under my breath, " Now, 
then, we are getting back into God's coun- 
try." 

As for Tallahassee itself, it was exactly 
what I had hoped to find it : a typical South- 
ern town ; not a camp in the woods, nor an 
old city metamorphosed into a fashionable 



WALES ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 209 

winter resort ; a place untainted by " North- 
ern enterprise," whose inhabitants were un- 
mistakably at home, and whose houses, many 
of them, at least, had no appearance of being 
for sale. It is compactly built on a hill, — 
the state capitol crowning the top, — down 
the pretty steep sides of which run roads 
into the open country all about. The roads, 
too, are not so sandy but that it is compar- 
atively comfortable to walk in them — a 
blessing which the pedestrian sorely misses 
in the towns of lower Florida : at St. Au- 
gustine, for example, where, as soon as one 
leaves the streets of the city itself, walking 
and carriage-riding alike become burden- 
some and, for any considerable distance, all 
but impossible. Here at Tallahassee, it was 
plain, I shoidd not be kept indoors for want 
of invitations from without. 

I arrived, as I have said, rather late in 
the afternoon ; so late that I did nothing 
more than ramble a little about the city, 
noting by the way the advent of the chim- 
ney swifts, which I had not found elsewhere, 
and returning to my lodgings with a hand- 
ful of " banana-shrub " blossoms, — smelling 
wonderfully like their name, — which a good 



210 WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

woman had insisted upon giving me when I 
stopped beside the fence to ask her the 
name of the bush. It was my first, but by 
no means my last, experience of the floral 
generosity of Tallahassee people. 

The next morning I woke betimes, and to 
my astonishment found the city enveloped 
in a dense fog. The hotel clerk, an old 
resident, to whom I went in my perplexity, 
was as much surprised as his questioner. 
He did not know what it could mean, he was 
siu'e ; it was very unusual ; but he thought 
it did not indicate foul weather. For a man 
so slightly acquainted with such phenomena, 
he proved to be a remarkably good prophet ; 
for though, during my fortnight's stay, 
there must have been at least eight foggy 
mornings, every day was sunny, and not a 
drop of rain fell. 

That first bright forenoon is still a bright 
memory. For one thing, the mocking-birds 
outsang themselves till I felt, and wrote, 
that I had never heard mocking-birds be- 
fore. That they really did surpass their 
brethren of St. Augustine and Sanford 
would perhaps be too much to assert, but so 
it seemed ; and I was pleased, some months 



WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 211 

afterward, to come upon a confirmatory 
judgment by Mr. Maurice Thompson, who, 
if any one, must be competent to speak. 

" If I were going to risk the reputation 
of our country on the singing of a mock- 
ing-bird against a European nightingale," 
says Mr. Thompson,^ " I should choose my 
champion from the hill-country in the neigh- 
borhood of Tallahassee, or from the environs 
of Mobile. ... I have found no birds else- 
where to compare with those in that belt of 
country about thirty miles wide, stretching 
from Live Oak in Florida, by way of Talla- 
hassee, to some miles west of Mobile." 

I had gone down the hill past some ne- 
gro cabins, into a small, straggling wood, 
and through the wood to a gate which let 
me into a plantation lane. It was the fair- 
est of summer forenoons (to me, I mean ; 
by the almanac it was only the 5th of 
April), and one of the fairest of quiet land- 
scapes : broad fields rising gently to the 
horizon, and before me, winding upward, a 
grassy lane open on one side, and bordered 
on the other by a deep red gulch and a zig- 
zag fence, along which grew vines, shrubs, 

^ By- Ways and Bird-Notes, p. 20. 



212 WALES ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

and tall trees. The tender and varied tints 
of tlie new leaves, the lively green of the 
young grain, the dark ploughed fields, the 
red earth of the wayside — I can see them 
yet, with all that Florida sunshine on them. 
In the bushes by the fence-row were a pair 
of cardinal grosbeaks, the male whistling 
divinely, quite unabashed by the volubility 
of a mocking-bird who balanced himself on 
the treetop overhead, 

'' Superb and sole, upon a plumed spray," 

and seemed determined to show a Yankee 
stranger what mocking-birds could really do 
when they set out. He did his work well ; the 
love notes of the flicker could not have been 
improved by the flicker himself ; but, right or 
wrong, I could not help feeling that the car- 
dinal struck a truer and deeper note ; while 
both toerether did not hinder me from hear- 
ing the faint songs of grasshopper sparrows 
rising from the ground on either side of the 
lane. It was a fine contrast: the mocker 
flooding the air from the topmost bough, 
and the sparrows whispering their few al- 
most inaudible notes out of the grass. Yes, 
and at the self-same moment the eye also 



WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 213 

had its contrast; for a marsh hawk was 
skimming over the field, while up in the 
sky soared a pair of hen-hawks. 

In the wood, composed of large trees, both 
hard wood and pine, I had found a group of 
three summer tanagers, two males and one 
female, — the usual proportion with birds 
generally, one may almost say, in the pair- 
ing season. The female was the first of her 
sex that I had seen, and I remarked with 
pleasure the comparative brightness of her 
dress. Among tanagers, as among negroes, 
red and yellow are esteemed a pretty good 
match. At this point, too, in a cluster of 
pines, I caught a new song — faint and list- 
less, like the indigo-bird's, I thought ; and 
at the word I started forward eagerly. 
Here, doubtless, was the indigo-bird's south- 
ern congener, the nonpareil, or painted bunt- 
ing, a beauty wdiich I had begun to fear I 
was to miss. I had recognized my first 
tanager from afar, ten days before, his voice 
and theme were so like his Northern rela- 
tive's ; but this time I was too hasty. My 
listless singer was not the nonpareil, nor 
even a finch of any kind, but a yellow- 
throated warbler. For a month I had seen 



214 WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

birds of his species almost daily, but always 
in hard wood trees, and silent. Henceforth, 
as long as I remained in Florida, they were 
invariably in pines, — their summer quar- 
ters, — and in free song. Their plumage is 
of the neatest and most exquisite ; few, even 
among warblers, surpass them in that re- 
gard: black and white (reminding one of 
the black-and-white creeper, which they 
resemble also in their feeding habits), with 
a splendid yellow gorget. Myrtle warblers 
(yellow-rumps) were still here (the penin- 
sula is alive with them in the winter), and a 
ruby-crowned kinglet mingled its lovely 
voice with the simple trills of pine warblers, 
while out of a dense low treetop some invis- 
ible singer was pouring a stream of fine-spun 
melody. It should have been a house wren, 
I thought (another was singing close by), 
only its tune was several times too long. 

At least four of my longer excursions into 
the surrounding country (long, not intrinsi- 
cally, but by reason of the heat) were made 
with a view to possible ivory-billed wood- 
peckers. Just out of the town northw^ard, 
beyond what appeared to be the court end of 
Marion Street, the principal business street 



WALES ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 215 

of the city, I had accosted a gentleman in a 
dooryard in front of a long, low, vine-cov- 
ered, romantic-looking house. He was evi- 
dently at home, and not so busy as to make 
an interruption probably intrusive. I in- 
quired the name of a tree, I believe. At all 
events, I engaged him in conversation, and 
found him most agreeable — an Ohio gentle- 
man, a man of science, who had been in the 
South long enough to have acquired large 
measures of Southern insouciance (there 
are times when a French word has a politer 
sound than any English equivalent), which 
takes life as made for something better than 
worry and pleasanter than hard work. He 
had seen ivory-bills, he said, and thought I 
might be equally fortunate if I would visit a 
certain swamp, about which he would tell 
me, or, better still, if I would go out to Lake 
Bradford. 

First, because it was nearer, I went to the 
swamp, taking an early breakfast and set- 
ting forth in a fog that was almost a mist, to 
make as much of the distance as possible be- 
fore the sun came out. My course lay west- 
ward, some four miles, along the railwaj^ 
track, which, thanks to somebody, is provided 



216 W\iLES ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

witli a comfortable footpath of hard clay cov- 
ering the sleepers midway between the rails. 
If all railroads were thus furnished they 
might be recommended as among the best 
of routes for walking naturalists, since they 
go straight through the wild country. This 
one carried me by turns through woodland 
and cultivated field, upland and swamp, pine 
land and hammock; and, happily, my ex- 
pectations of the ivory-bill were not lively 
enough to quicken my steps or render me 
heedless of things along the way. 

Here I was equally surprised and de- 
lighted by the sight of yellow jessamine still 
in flower more than a month after I had 
seen the end of its brief season, only a hun- 
dred miles further south. So great, appar- 
ently, is the difference between the penin- 
sula and this Tallahassee hill-country, which 
by its physical geography seems rather to 
be a part of Georgia than of Florida. 
Here, too, the pink azalea was at its pretti- 
est, and the flowering dogwood, also, true 
queen of the woods in Florida as in Massa- 
chusetts. The fringe-bush, likewise, stood 
here and there in solitary state, and thorn- 
bushes flourished in bewildering variety. 



WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 217 

Nearer the track were the omnipresent black- 
berry vines, some patches of which are es- 
pecially remembered for their bright rosy 
flowers. 

Out of the dense vegetation of a swamp 
came the cries of Florida gallinules, and 
then, of a sudden, I caught, or seemed to 
catch, the sweet kurwee whistle of a Caro- 
lina rail. Instinctively I turned my ear for 
its repetition, and by so doing admitted to 
myself that I was not certain of what I had 
heard, although the sora's call is familiar, 
and the bird was reasonably near. I had 
been taken unawares, and every ornitholo- 
gist knows how hard it is to be sure of one's 
self in such a case. He knows, too, how 
uncertain he feels of any brother observer 
who in a similar case seems troubled by no 
distrust of his own senses. The whistle, 
whatever it had been, was not repeated, and 
I lost my only opportunity of adding the 
sora's name to my Florida catalogue — a 
loss, fortunately, of no consequence to any 
but myself, since the bird is well known as 
a winter visitor to the State. 

Further along, a great blue heron was 
stalking about the edge of a marshy pool, 



218 WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

and further still, in a woody swamp, stood 
three little blue herons, one of them in white 
plumage. In the drier and more open parts 
of the way cardinals, mocking-birds, and 
thrashers were singing, ground doves were 
cooing, quails were prophesying, and logger- 
head shrikes sat, trim and silent, on the 
telegraph wire. In the pine lands were 
plenty of brown-headed nuthatches, full, as 
always, of friendly gossip ; two red-shoid- 
dered hawks, for whom life seemed to wear 
a more serious aspect ; three Maryland yel- 
low throats ; a pair of bluebirds, rare enough 
now to be twice welcome ; a black-and-white 
creeper, and a yellow redpoll warbler. In 
the same pine woods, too, there was much 
good music : house wrens, Carolina wrens, 
red-eyed and white-eyed vireos, pine war- 
blers, yellow-throated warblers, blue yellow- 
backs, red-eyed chewinks, and, twice wel- 
come, like the bluebirds, a Carolina chicka- 
dee. 

A little beyond this point, in a cut through 
a low sand bank, I found two pairs of rough- 
winged swallows, and stopped for some time 
to stare at them, being myself, meanwhile, 
a gazing-stock for two or three negroes 



WALES ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 219 

lounging about tlie door of a cabin not far 
away. It is a bappy cbance wbeu a man's 
time is double/ improved. Two of tbe birds 
— the first ones I bad ever seen, to be sure 
of them — percbed directly before me on 
tbe wire, one facing me, tbe otber witb bis 
back turned. It was kindly done; and 
tben, as if still furtber to gratify my curi- 
osity, tbey visited a bole in tbe bank. A 
second bole was doubtless tbe property of 
tbe otber pair. Living alternately in 
beaven and in a bole in tbe ground, tbey 
wore tbe livery of tbe eartb. 

" They are not fair to outward view 
As many swallows be," 

I said to myself. But I was not tbe less 
glad to see tbem. 

I sbould bave been gladder for a sigbt of 
tbe big woodpecker, wbose reputed dwell- 
ing-place lay not far abead. But, tbougb I 
waited and listened, and went tbrougb tbe 
swamp, and beyond it, I beard no strange 
sbout, nor saw any strange bird ; and toward 
noon, just as tbe sun brusbed away tbe fog, 
I left tbe railway track for a carriage by- 
way wbicb, I felt sure, must somebow bring 
me back to tbe city. And so it did, past 



220 WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

here and there a house, till I came to the 
main road, and then to the Murat estate, 
and was again on familiar ground. 

Two mornings afterward I made another 
early and foggy start, this time for Lake 
Bradford. My instructions were to follow 
the railway for a mile or so beyond the 
station, and then take a road bearing away 
sharply to the left. This I did, making 
sure I was on the right road by inquiring of 
the first man I saw — a negro at work be- 
fore his cabin. I had gone perhaps half a 
mile further when a white man, on his way 
after a load of wood, as I judged, drove up 
behind me. " Won't you ride ? " he asked. 
" You are going to Lake Bradford, 1 believe, 
and I am going a j^iece in the same direc- 
tion." I jumped up behind (the wagon 
consisting of two long planks fastened to the 
two axles), thankful, but not without a little 
bewilderment. The good-hearted negro, it 
appeared, had asked the man to look out for 
me ; and he, on his part, seemed glad to do 
a kindness as well as to find company. We 
jolted along, chatting at arm's length, as it 
were, about this and that. He knew nothing 
of the ivory-bill ; but wild turkeys — oh, yes, 



WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 221 

he had seen a flock of eight, as well as he 
could count, not long before, crossing the 
road in the very woods through which I was 
going. As for snakes, they were plenty 
enough, he guessed. One of his horses was 
bitten while ploughing, and died in half 
an hour. (A Florida man who cannot tell 
at least one snake story may be set down 
as having land to sell.) He thought it a 
pretty good jaunt to the lake, and the road 
was n't any too plain, though no doubt I 
should get there ; but I began to perceive 
that a white man who traveled such dis- 
tances on foot in that country was more of 
a rara avis than any woodpecker. 

Our roads diverged after a while, and my 
own soon ran into a wood with an under- 
growth of saw palmetto. This was the place 
for the ivory-bill, and as at the swamp two 
days before, so now I stopped and listened, 
and then stopped and listened again. The 
Fates were still against me. There was nei- 
ther woodpecker nor turkey, and I pushed on, 
mostly through pine woods — full of birds, 
but nothing new — till I came out at the lake. 
Here, beside an idle sawmill and heaps of 
sawdust, I was greeted by a solitary negro. 



222 WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

well along in years, who demanded, in a tone 
of almost comical astonishment, where in the 
world I had come from. I told him from 
Tallahassee, and he seemed so taken aback 
that I began to think I must look uncom- 
monly like an invalid, a " Northern consump- 
tive," perhaps. Otherwise, why should a 
walk of six miles, or something less, be 
treated as such a marvel? However, the 
negro and I were soon on the friendliest of 
terms, talking of the old times, the war, the 
prospects of the colored people (the younger 
ones were fast going to the bad, he thought), 
while I stood looking out over the lake, a 
pretty sheet of water, surrounded mostly by 
cypress woods, but disfigured for the present 
by the doings of lumbermen. What inter- 
ested me most (such is the fate of the de- 
votee) was a single barn swallow, the first 
and only one that I saw on my Southern 
trijD. 

On my way back to the city, after much 
fatherly advice about the road on the part 
of the negro, who seemed to feel that I ran 
the greatest risk of getting lost, I made 
two more additions to my Florida catalogue 
— the wood duck and the j^ellow-billed 



TVALES ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 223 

cuckoo, the latter unexpectedly early (April 
11), since Mr. Chapman had recorded it as 
arriving at Gainesville at a date sixteen days 
later than this. 

I did not repeat my visit to Lake Brad- 
ford ; but, not to give up the ivory-bill too 
easily, — and because I must walk some- 
where, — I went again as far as the palmetto 
scrub. This time, though I still missed the 
woodpecker, I was fortunate enough to come 
upon a turkey. In the thickest part of the 
wood, as I turned a corner, there she stood 
before me in the middle of the road. She 
ran along the horse-track for perhaps a rod, 
and then disappeared among the palmetto 
leaves. 

Meanwhile, two or three days before, 
while returning from St. Mark's, whither I 
had gone for a day on the river, I had 
noticed from the car window a swamp, or 
baygall, which looked so promising that I 
went the very next morning to see what it 
would yield. I had taken it for a cypress 
swamp, but it proved to be composed mainly 
of oaks ; very tall but rather slender trees, 
heavily draped with hanging moss and 
standing in black water. Among them were 



224 WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

the swollen stumps, three or four feet high, 
of larger trees which had been felled. I 
pushed in through the surrounding shrub- 
bery and bay-trees, and waited for some 
time, leaning against one of the larger 
trunks and listening to the noises, of which 
the air of the swamp was full. Great- 
crested flycatchers, two Acadian flycatchers, 
a multitude of blue yellow-backed warblers, 
and what I supposed to be some loud-voiced 
frogs were especially conspicuous in the con- 
cert ; but a Carolina wren, a cardinal, a red- 
eyed vireo, and a blue-gray gnatcatcher, the 
last with the merest thread of a voice, con- 
tributed their share to the medley, and once 
a chickadee struck up his sweet and gentle 
strain in the very depths of the swamp — 
like an angel singing in hell. 

My walk on the railway, that wonderful 
St. Mark's branch (I could never have im- 
agined the possibility of running trains over 
so crazy a track), took me through the 
choicest of bird country. The bushes were 
alive, and the air rang with music. In the 
midst of the chorus I suddenly caught some- 
where before me what I had no doubt was 
the song of a purple finch, a bird that I had 



WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 225 

not yet seen in Florida. I quickened my 
steps, and to my delight the singer proved 
to be a blue grosbeak. I had caught a 
glimpse of one two days before, as I have 
described in another chapter, but with no 
opportunity for a final identification. Here, 
as it soon turned out, there were at least 
four birds, all males, and all singing ; chas- 
ing each other about after the most per- 
sistent fashion, in a piece of close shrub- 
bery with tall trees interspersed, and act- 
ing — the four of them — just as two birds 
are often seen to do when contending for 
the possession of a building site. At a first 
hearing the song seems not so long sustained 
as the purple finch's commonly is, but ex- 
ceedingly like it in voice and manner, though 
not equal to it, I should be inclined to say, 
in either respect. The birds made fre- 
quent use of a monosyllabic call, correspond- 
ing to the calls of the purple finch and the 
rose-breasted grosbeak, but readily distin- 
guishable from both. I was greatly pleased 
to see them, and thought them extremely 
handsome, with their dark blue plumage set 
oif by wing patches of rich chestnut. 

A little farther, and I was saluted by the 



226 WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

saucy cry of my first Florida chat. The 
fellow had chosen just such a tangled 
thicket as he favors in Massachusetts, and 
whistled and kept out of sight after the 
most approved manner of his kind. On the 
other side of the track a white-eyed vireo 
was asserting himself, as he had been doing 
since the day I reached St. Augustine ; but 
though he seems a pretty clever substitute 
for the chat in the chat's absence, his light 
is quickly put out when the clown himself 
steps into the ring. Ground doves cooed, 
cardinals whistled, and mocking-birds sang 
and mocked by turns. Orchard orioles, no 
unworthy companions of mocking-birds and 
cardinals, sang here and there from a low 
treetop, especially in the vicinity of houses. 
To judge from what I saw, they are among 
the most characteristic of Tallahassee birds, 
— as numerous as Baltimore orioles are in 
Massachusetts towns, and frequenting much 
the same kind of places. In one day's walk 
I counted twonty-five. Elegantly dressed as 
they are, — and elegance is better than 
brilliancy, perhaps, even in a bird, — they 
seem to be thoroughly democratic. It was 
a pleasure to see them so fond of cabin door- 
yards. 



WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 227 

Of tlie other birds along the St. Mark's 
railway, let it be enough to mention white- 
throated and white-crowned sparrows, red- 
eyed che winks (the white-eye was not found 
in the Tallahassee region), a red-bellied 
woodpecker, two red - shouldered hawks, 
shrikes, kingbirds, yellow-throated warblers, 
Maryland yellow-throats, pine warblers, 
palm warblers, — which in spite of their 
name seek their summer homes north of 
the United States, — myrtle warblers, now 
grown scarce, house wrens, summer tan- 
agers, and quails. The last-named birds, 
by the way, I had expected to find known 
as " partridges " at the South, but as a 
matter of fact I heard that name applied 
to them only once. On the St. Augustine 
road, before breakfast, I met an old negro 
setting out for his day's work behind a 
pair of oxen. " Taking some good exer- 
cise ? " he asked, by way of a neighborly 
greeting ; and, not to be less neighborly 
than he, I responded with some remark 
about a big shot-gun which occupied a con- 
spicuous place in his cart. " Oh," he said, 
"game is plenty out where we are going, 
about eight miles, and I take the gun 



228 WALES ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

along." " What kind of game ?" " Well, 
sir, we may sometimes find a partridge." I 
smiled at the anti-climax, but was glad to 
hear Bob White honored for once with his 
Southern title. 

A good many of my jaunts took me past 
the gallinule swamp before mentioned, and 
almost always I stopped and went near. It 
was worth while to hear the poultry cries of 
the gallinules if nothing more ; and often 
several of the birds would be seen swimming 
about among the big white lilies and the 
green tussocks. Once I discovered one of 
them sitting upright on a stake, — a preca- 
rious seat, off which he soon tumbled 
awkwardly into the water. At another 
time, on the same stake, sat some dark, 
strange-looking object. The opera-glass 
showed it at once to be a large bird sit- 
ting with its back toward me, and holding 
its wings uplifted in the familiar heraldic, 
e-2jluribus-U7ium attitude of our American 
spread-eagle ; but even then it was some 
seconds before I recognized it as an anhinga, 
— water turkey, — though it was a male 
in full nuptial garb. I drew nearer and 
nearer, and meanwhile it turned squarely 



WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 229 

about, — a slow and ticklish operation, — 
so tliat its back was presented to the sun ; 
as if it had dried one side of its wings and 
tail, — for the latter, too, was fully spread, 

— and now would dry the other. There for 
some time it sat preening its feathers, with 
monstrous twistings and untwistings of its 
snaky neck. If the chat is a clown, the wa- 
ter turkey would make its fortune as a con- 
tortionist. Finally it rose, circled about till 
it got well aloft, and then, setting its wings, 
sailed away southward and vanished, leav- 
ing me in a state of wonder as to where it 
had come from, and whether it was often to 
be seen in such a place — perfectly open, 
close beside the highway, and not far from 
houses. I did not expect ever to see an- 
other, but the next morning, on my way up 
the railroad to pay a second visit to the 
ivory-bill's swamp, I looked up by chance, 

— a brown thrush was singing on the tele- 
graph wire, — and saw two anhingas soaring- 
overhead, their silvery wings glistening in 
the sun as they wheeled. I kept my glass 
on them till the distance swallowed them up. 

Of one long forenoon's ramble I retain 
particular remembrance, not on account of 



230 WALES ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

any birds, but for a half hour of pleasant 
human intercourse. I went out of the city 
by an untried road, hoping to find some 
trace of migrating birds, especially of cer- 
tain warblers, the prospect of whose ac- 
quaintance was one of the lesser considera- 
tions which had brought me so far from 
home. No such trace appeared, however, 
nor, in my fortnight's stay in Tallahassee, in 
almost the height of the migratory season, 
did I, so far as I could tell, see a single 
passenger bird of any sort. Some species 
arrived from the South — cuckoos and ori- 
oles, for example; others, no doubt, took 
their departure for the North ; but to the 
best of my knowledge not one passed 
through. It was a strange contrast to what 
is witnessed everywhere in New England. 
By some other route swarms of birds must 
at that moment have been entering the 
United States from Mexico and beyond; 
but unless my observation was at fault, — 
and I am assured that sharper eyes than 
mine have had a similar experience, — their 
line of march did not bring them into the 
Florida hill-country. My morning's road 
not only showed me no birds, but led me 



WALES ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 231 

nowhere, and, growing discouraged, I turned 
back till I came to a lane leading off to the 
left at right angles. This I followed so far 
that it seemed wise, if possible, to make my 
way back to the city without retracing my 
steps. Not to spend my strength for naught, 
however (the noonday sun having always to 
be treated with respect), I made for a soli- 
tary house in the distance. Another lane 
ran past it. That, perhaps, would answer 
my purpose. I entered the yard, all ablaze 
with roses, and in response to my knock a 
gentleman appeared upon the doorstep. 
Yes, he said, the lane would carry me 
straight to the Meridian road (so I think he 
called it), and thence into the city. "Past 
Dr. H.'s ? " I asked, " Yes." And then I 
knew where I was. 

First, however, I must let my new ac- 
quaintance show me his garden. His name 
was G., he said. Most likely I had heard 
of him, for the legislature was just then hav- 
ing a good deal to say about his sheep, in 
connection with some proposed dog-law. 
Did I like roses ? As he talked he cut one 
after another, naming each as he put it into 
my hand. Then I must look at his Japan- 



232 WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

ese persimmon trees, and many other things. 
Here was a pretty shrub. Perhaps I could 
tell what it was by crushing and smelling a 
leaf ? No ; it was something familiar ; I 
sniffed, and looked foolish, and after all he 
had to tell me its name — camphor. So we 
went the rounds of the garden, — frighten- 
ing a mocking-bird off her nest in an orange- 
tree, — till my hands were full. It is too 
bad I have forgotten how many pecan-trees 
he had planted, and how many sheep he 
kept. A well-regulated memory would have 
held fast to such figures : mine is certain 
only that there were four eggs in the mock- 
ing-bird's nest. Mr. G. was a man of en- 
terprise, at any rate ; a match for any Yan- 
kee, although he had come to Florida not 
from Yankeeland, but from northern Geor- 
gia. I hope all his crops are still thriving, 
especially his white roses and his Marshal 
Niels. 

In the lane, after skirting some pleasant 
woods, which I meant to visit again, but 
found no opportunity, I was suddenly as- 
saulted by a pair of brown thrashers, half 
beside themselves after their manner because 
of my approach to their nest. How close 



WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 233 

my approach was I cannot say ; but it must 
be confessed that I played upon their fears 
to the utmost of my ability, wishing to see 
as many of their neighbors as the disturb- 
ance would bring together. Several other 
thrashers, a catbird, and two house wrens 
appeared (all these, since " blood is thicker 
than water," may have felt some special 
cousinly solicitude, for aught I know), with 
a ruby-crowned kinglet and a field sparrow. 

In the valley, near a little pond, as I came 
out into the Meridian road, a solitary vireo 
was singing, in the very spot where one had 
been heard six days before. Was it the 
same bird ? I asked myself. And was it 
settled for the summer ? Such an explana- 
tion seemed the more likely because I had 
found no solitary vireo anywhere else about 
the cit}^ though the species had been com- 
mon earlier in the season in eastern and 
southern Florida, where I had seen my last 
one — at New Smyrna — March 26. 

At this same dip in the Meridian road, 
on a previous visit, I had experienced one of 
the pleasantest of my Tallahassee sensations. 
The morning was one of those when every 
bird is in tune. By the road side I had just 



234 WALES ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

passed Carolina wrens, house wrens, a chip- 
per, a field sparrow, two thrashers, an abun- 
dance of chewinks, two orchard orioles, 
several tanagers, a flock of quail, and mock- 
ing-birds and cardinals uncounted. In a 
pine wood near by, a wood pewee, a pine 
warbler, a yellow-throated warbler, and a 
pine-wood s23arrow were singing — a most 
peculiarly select and modest chorus. Just 
at the lowest point in the valley I stopped 
to listen to a song which I did not recognize, 
but which, by and by, I settled upon as 
probably the work of a freakish prairie war- 
bler. At that moment, as if to confirm my 
conjecture, — which in the retrospect be- 
comes almost ridiculous, — a prairie warbler 
hopped into sight on an outer twig of the 
water-oak out of which the music had pro- 
ceeded. Still something said, "Are you 
sure?" and I stepped inside the fence. 
There on the ground were two or three 
wdiite-crowned sparrows, and in an instant 
the truth of the case flashed upon me. I 
remembered the saying of a friend, that the 
song of the white-crown had reminded him 
of the vesper sparrow and the black-throated 
green warbler. That was my bird ; and I 



WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 235 

listened again, thougli I could no longer be 
said to feel in doubt. A long time I waited. 
Again and again the birds sang, and at last 
I discovered one of them perched at the top 
of the oak, tossing back his head and war- 
bling — a white-crowned sparrow: the one 
regular Massachusetts migrant which I had 
often seen, but had never heard utter a 
sound. 

The strain opens with smooth, sweet notes 
almost exactly like the introductory syllables 
of the vesper sparrow. Then the tone 
changes, and the remainder of the song is in 
something like the pleasingly hoarse voice of 
a prairie warbler, or a black-throated green. 
It is soft and very pretty ; not so perfect a 
piece of art as the vesper sparrow's tune, — 
few bird-songs are, — but taking for its very 
oddity, and at the same time tender and 
sweet. More than one writer has described 
it as resembling the song of the white-throat. 
Even Minot, who in general was the most 
painstaking and accurate of observers, as he 
is one of the most interesting of our syste- 
matic writers, says that the two songs are 
" almost exactly " alike. There could be no 
better example of the fallibility which at- 



236 WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 

taches, and in tlie nature of tlie case must 
attach, to all writing upon such subjects. 
The two songs have about as much in com- 
mon as those of the hermit thrush and 
the brown thrasher, or those of the song 
sparrow and the chipper. In other words, 
they have nothing in common. Prob- 
ably in Minot's case, as in so many others 
of a similar nature, the simple explana- 
tion is that when he thought he was lis- 
tening to one bird he was really listening to 
another. 

The Tallahassee road to which I had of ten- 
est resorted, to which, now, from far Massa- 
chusetts, I oftenest look back, the St. Au- 
gustine road, so called, I have spoken of 
elsewhere. Thither, after packing my trunk 
on the morning of the 18th, I betook my- 
self for a farewell stroll. My holiday was 
done. For the last time, perhaps, I listened 
to the mocking-bird and the cardinal, as by 
and by, when the grand holiday is over, I 
shall listen to my last wood thrush and my 
last bluebird. But what then? Florida 
fields are still bright, and neither mocking- 
bird nor cardinal knows aught of my ab- 
sence. And so it will be. 



WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE. 237 

" When you and I behind the Veil are past, 
Oh, but the long-, long while the World shall last." 

None the less, it is good to have lived 
our day and taken our peep at the mighty 
show. Ten thousand things we may have 
fretted ourselves about, uselessly or worse. 
But to have lived in the sun, to have loved 
natural beauty, to have felt the majesty of 
trees, to have enjoyed the sweetness of 
flowers and the music of birds, — so much, 
at least, is not vanity nor vexation of spirit. 



INDEX. 



Am-PLANTS, 104. 
Alligator, 131, 146. 
Azalea, 172, 206, 216. 

Baptisia, 206. 
Beggar's-ticks, 27. 
Blackberry, 27, 29, 117, 152, 

163, 217. 
Blackbird, red - wing, 97, 

106, 134, 145, 147, 161, 167. 
Bladderwort, 29. 
Bluebird, 4, 115, 147, 170, 

218. 
Blue-eyed Grass, 30. 
Butterworts, 27, 28, 29, 173. 
Buzzard, turkey, 20, 36, 38, 

66, 126, 128, 145. 

Calopogon, 125. 

Carrion Crow (Black Vul- 
ture), 40, 134, 191. 

Catbird, 65, 233. 

Cedar-bird, 80. 

Cedar, red, 90. 

Chat, yeUow-breasted, 226. 

Cherokee Rose, 125, 165, 172, 
201, 206. 

Cherry, wild, 175. 

Chewink (Towhee) : — 

red -eyed, 65, 167, 218, 

227, 234. 
white -eyed, 5, 65, 115, 
227. 

Chickadee, Carolina, 21, 97, 
218, 224. 

Chimney Swift, 209. 

Chuck-will's-widow, 96. 

Clematis Baldwinii, 125. 



Clover, buffalo, 191. 

Cloudberry, 29. 

Coot (Fulica americana), 

134. 
Coquina Clam, 55. 
Coreopsis, 30. 
Cormorant, 66, 78, 124, 134, 

145. 
Crab-apple, 172. 
Creeper, black - and - white, 

97, 218. 
Cross- vine, 172. 
Crow, 5, 35, 37, 100, 114, 124. 
Cuckoo, yellow - billed, 176, 

222. 
Cypress-tree, 127. 

Dabchiek, 124, 128, 134, 145. 
Dove : — 

Carolina, 147. 

ground, 65, 147, 218, 
226. 
Duck, wood, 222. 

Eagle, bald, 43, 79, 143, 145. 
Egret : — 

great white, 76. 

little white, 75. 

Fish-hawk, 42, 44, 79, 116, 

127, 143, 147. 
Flicker (Golden - winged 

Woodpecker), 4, 65, 81, 

106. 
Flowering Dogwood, 172, 

206, 216. 
Flycatchers : — 
Acadian, 224. 



240 



INDEX. 



Flycatchers : — 

crested, 153, 224. 

kingbird, 176, 190, 191, 
227. 

phoebe, 8, 65, 81. 

wood pewee, 170, 234. 
Fringe-bush, 206, 216. 
Frogs, 185. 

Gallinule : — 

Florida, 132, 217, 228. 
purple, 137, 139. 
Gannet, 46. 

Gnateatcher, blue-gray, 224. 
Golden club, 27. 
Goldenrod, 26. 
Grackle, boat - tailed, 107, 

124, 145. 
Grebe, pied-billed, 124, 128, 

134, 145. 
Grosbeak : — 

cardinal, 64, 81, 114, 
118, 166, 176, 191, 212, 
218, 226, 234. 
blue, 187, 191, 224. 
Gull:- 

Bonaparte's, 48. 
ring-billed, 49. 

Hawk : — 

fish, 42, 44, 79, 116, 127, 

143, 147. 
marsh, 36, 38, 176, 213. 
[ red-shouldered, 106, 115, 

218, 227. 
sparrow, 76, 169. 
swallow-tailed, 138. 
Heron : — 

great blue, 35, 36, 39, 50, 

70, 107, 134, 145, 190, 

217. 
great white {or Egret), 

76. 
green, 76, 107, 133, 181. 
little blue, 74, 107, 134, 

145, 181, 218. 
Louisiana, 74, 75, 107, 

145. 



Heron : — 

night (black - crowned), 
133, 145. 
Honeysuckle : — 
scarlet, 172. 
white, 151, 172. 
Houstonia, round-leaved, 26, 

82, 105, 116. 
Humming-bird, ruby-throat- 
ed, 114, 118, 153. 
Hypoxis, 27. 

Iris versicolor, 29, 112, 139. 

Jay: — 

Florida, 61. 

Florida blue, 62, 153. 
Judas-tree, 27. 

Killdeer Plover, 39, 78. 
Kingbird, 176, 190, 191, 227. 
Kingfisher, 6, 36, 39, 145, 

147. 
Kinglet, ruby - crowned, 81, 

153, 170, 214, 233. 
Kite, fork-tailed, 138. 
Krigia, 27. 

Lantana, 151, 172. 

Lark, meadow, 6, 145, 183. 

Leptopoda, 30. 

Live-oak, 96, 104. 

Lizards, 115. 

Lobelia Feayana, 30. 

Loggerhead Shrike, 5, 111, 

123, 177, 190, 191, 200, 

218. 
Lygodesmia, 125. 

Martin, purple, 65, 124, 145, 

147, 158, 176. 
Maryland Yellow - throat, 

116, 218, 227. 
Mocking-bird, 4, 64, 81, 123, 

167, 170, 176, 191, 210, 212, 

218, 232, 234. 
Mullein, 27. 
Myrtle Bird. See Warbler. 



INDEX. 



241 



Night-hawk, 176. 
Nuthatch, brown-headed, 6, 
106, 218. 

Orange, wild, 87, 105. 
Oriole, orchard, 177, 183, 

191, 194, 200, 226, 234. 
Osprey. See Fish-Hawk. 
Oven-bird, 80. 
Oxalis, yellow, 26, 37, 81, 

152. 

Papaw, 125. 
Paroquet, 147. 
Partridge-berry, 105. 
Pelican : — 

brown, 47. 

white, 66. 
Persimmon, 175. 
Phcfibe, 8, 65, 81. 
Pipewort, 30. 
Poison Ivy, 116. 
Poppy, Mexican, 152. 

QuaU, 115, 118, 167, 176, 218, 
227, 234. 

Rail: — 

Carolina, 217. 
clapper, 98. 
king, 138. 
Redbird (Cardinal Gros- 
beak), 64, 81, 114, 118, 166, 
176,191,212,218,224,226, 
234. 
"Ricebird,"161. 
Robin, 4. 

Salvia lyrata, 82. 
Sanderling, 49, 59. 
Sandpiper : — 

solitary, 181, 191. 

spotted, 35, 78. 
Sassafras, 175. 
Schrankia, 125. 
Senecio, 139. 

Shrike, loggerhead, 5, 111, 
177, 190, 191, 200, 218, 227. 



Sow Thistle, 26. 
Snakebird (Water Turkey), 

66, 79, 141, 228. 
Sparrow : — 

chipping, 234. 
field, 15, 233, 234. 
grasshopper ( yellow - 

winged), 212. 
pine-wood, 6, 13, 106, 

118, 234. 
savanna, 65, 145. 
song, 65. 
white-crowned, 190, 191, 

201, 227, 234. 
white-throated, 153, 191, 
227. 
Spiderwort, 81. 
St. Peter's-wort, 27, 28. 
Strawberry, 173. 
Swallow : — 
barn, 222. 
rough-winged, 218. 
tree (white -bellied), 8, 
65, 124, 145, 147. 
Swift, chimney, 209. 

Tanager, summer, 96, 153, 

184, 191, 213, 227, 234. 
Tern, 49, 59, 78. 
Thorns, 172, 216. 
Thrasher (Brown Thrush), 
17, 64, 168, 191, 218, 229, 
232. 
Thrush : — 

hermit, 80, 170. 

Northern water, 80. 

Louisiana water, 80. 
Titlark, 38. 
Titmouse : — 

CaroHna, 21, 97. 

tufted, 96. 
Towhee. See Chewink. 
Turkey, 147, 220, 223. 

Vaccinium, arboreum, 172. 
Venus 's Looking-glass (Spee- 

ularia), 152. 
Verbena, 81. 



242 



INDEX. 



Violets, 27, 81, 116, 173. 
Vireo : — 

red-eyed, 218, 224. 

solitary, 97, 233. 

white-eyed, 36, 115, 170, 
218, 226. 

yellow-throated, 191. 
Virginia creeper, 116. 
Vulture (Carrion Crow), 40, 
134, 191. 

Warbler : — 

black - throated green, 

21. 
blue yellow-backed, 96, 

124, 147, 218, 224. 
myrtle (yellow-rumped), 

36, 65, 97, 124, 145, 

191, 214. 
palm (yellow redpoll), 

65, 81, 145, 191, 218, 

227. 
pine, 4, 106, 115, 214, 218, 

227, 234. 
prairie, 81, 97, 124, 234. 
yellow - throated (Den- 

droica dominica), 21, 

97, 153, 184, 213, 218, 

227, 234. 



Water Lily, 206, 228. 
Water Tlirush : — 
Louisiana, 80, 
Northern, 80. 
Water Turkey (Snakebird), 

QQ, 79, 141, 228. 
Wood Pewee, 170, 234. 
Woodpecker : — 
downy. 4. 
golden-winged (flicker), 

4, 65, 81, 106. 
ivory-billed, 190, 214. 
pileated, 25. 

red-bellied, 106, 169, 227. 
red-cockaded, 6, 24. 
red-headed, 177. 
Wren : — 

Carolina (mocking), 64, 
116, 153, 200, 218, 224, 
234. 
house, 81, 166, 214, 218, 

227, 233, 234. 
long -billed marsh, 38, 

100. 
winter, 17. 

Yellow Jessamine, 105, 216. 
Yellow-legs (Totanus fla- 
vipes), 181, 191. 



